Editorial

For the first issue of 2012 we are pleased to bring you a general issue: special issues allow us to deepen our thinking about a particular area, but general issues serve to remind us of the importance and variety of applications of analytic ideas in public health settings.

Psychoanalysis has focused a great deal on the importance of the relationship to the ‘breast’ during development. Jeremy Holmes opens this issue of the journal with an engaging paper focusing on the importance of the face as a ‘vehicle for generating meaning and representation’ (this issue) and explores the implications of this for psychotherapy.

One of the facts of life in psychotherapy is that when clinical material is presented, there will be as many opinions as there are psychotherapists in the room. Stephen Briggs and colleagues apply this fact of psychotherapy in its most creative form to generate an exchange of ideas about suicide as they discuss a clinical case from different perspectives, focusing in particular on the traumatising impact of suicide on the mind.

The papers by Cairns, Lunn & Poulsen and Keinänen and colleagues address very different subjects: the unconscious processes involved in the decision to place a family member with dementia into residential care, the manualisation of a psychoanalytic intervention for bulimic patients and a review of the literature on psychosocial risk factors for borderline personality disorder. These papers are united, however, by a willingness to study the question they address in a systematic fashion, with the help of research findings and/or methodology (qualitative and quantitative), thus highlighting the benefits of an ongoing relationship between psychoanalysis and research as one of several perspectives that can add to our practice. In our current times, with our organisations facing – and being overwhelmed by – external pressures and the evidence-based practice agenda, this dialogue is more important than ever.