Editorial

I am delighted to welcome Arabella Kurtz as our newly appointed Book Reviews Editor. Arabella is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist with over 20 years’ experience of working in adult and forensic mental health services. She is also Senior Clinical Tutor and Honorary Senior Lecturer on the Doctoral Clinical Psychology Programme at University of Leicester. She is a regular reviewer and contributor to the journal and has been on the Editorial Advisory Board since 2013. She has been invaluable to me as a reviewer with expertise in empirical research, particularly qualitative methodology. She enters the role with enthusiasm and innovative ideas about how to increase the pool of reviewers and develop the journal’s profile in general. She replaces Heather Wood who has worked quietly and tirelessly as Book Reviews Editor behind the scenes of the journal for the past 5 years, and to whom I am extremely grateful for selectively allocating books to match the expertise of reviewers and maintaining a steady flow of reviews to be published in each issue. I am very pleased that Heather has agreed to continue as a much valued reviewer of submitted papers to the journal.

It is therefore fitting that the first paper in this Spring issue of 2017, ‘An in-depth observational study of an acute psychiatric ward: Combining the psychodynamic observational method with thematic analysis to develop understanding of ward culture’ is by Arabella and her co-authors, and demonstrates the significance of qualitative methods in applied psychoanalytic research. They present the results of an observational study of an acute adult in-patient psychiatric ward with the aim of furthering understanding through the lens of the social defence paradigm, which emerged out of the seminal work of Menzies-Lyth and others, of complex healthcare cultures in the National Health Service (NHS), an area that has come under increasing scrutiny since the failures of care in the Mid-Staff