Editorial

After three years as Editor of this journal, this is my final editorial. It has been a privilege to work on this journal and I am very grateful to the APP for giving me this opportunity. As an Editor one is engaged in an enriching cycle of CPD (Continuing Professional Development): every paper is a window into the inspiring work being carried out by colleagues in the UK and abroad. Their work sustains a psychoanalytic presence in the public healthcare and voluntary services and in academic research settings. This presence has always been important, but it has become all the more important to raise its profile through publications in our current context – one in which psychoanalysis is being marginalized and in which several psychoanalytic services in the UK are under threat and a few have been closed down.

The publication of clinical work remains very close to the heart of this Journal, but in the current climate research has become vital to our sustainability in the long term, and hence over the past three years the Journal has increased the publication of research papers. Dialogue with other disciplines and therapeutic modalities is also important to the evolution of our discipline, and hence we have also prioritised these publications.

In this issue, Hobson, Cooper and Wren ably illustrate the importance of an open yet critical engagement with the relationship between ‘scientific evidence’ and practice. Werbart et al. remind us of how research can inform practice by studying patients who are dissatisfied with their experiences of psychoanalytic psychotherapy having completed the planned course of treatment. Spurling looks at what psychoanalytic psychotherapy can learn from another modality – interpersonal psychotherapy – as well as what it has to offer to this modality through exploring the delicate balance between emphasising external and psychic reality when hearing and responding to a patient's material. Finally, Levander and Holmqvist share some research based