Editorial

This issue of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, with papers from Germany, the UK and Italy, explores from a psychoanalytic perspective the concepts of trauma, depression and personality disorder, the relationships between them, and the limitations of conventional diagnostic categories. The first paper, ‘Childhood trauma from a patient and a psychoanalyst perspective: linking chronic depression to relational multiple trauma’ by Alexa Negele, Johannes Kaufhold and Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, examines the relationship between multiple childhood trauma, adversity and chronic depression. This is the second paper published in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy by researchers from the LAC depression study, a major, multi-site, ongoing comparative study of outcomes of psychoanalytical and cognitive behavioural long-term treatments of chronically depressed patients conducted at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt (see Leuzinger-Bohleber, Kallenbach, & Schoett, 2016). Findings from the LAC study showed that three quarters of participating patients reported clinically relevant histories of childhood trauma. This paper examines a subsample of patients in the larger LAC study, comparing patient self-ratings of trauma with their treating psychoanalysts’ perspectives, the results of which support the connection between multiple childhood trauma and chronic depression. These findings are illustrated with detailed clinical material from one of the patients who participated in the LAC study from the beginning of his therapy to five-year follow-up, which convincingly demonstrates how the patient was able to gain insight into the effects that his childhood traumatic experiences had on his adult relationships and mental health due to a psychoanalytic therapeutic process in which both the patient and the analyst worked together to reconstruct the meaning of traumatic experiences. The emerging findings from LAC study complement the results of the Tavistock Adult Depression Study (TADS) (Fonag