Editorial

This issue of the journal focuses on the importance of relationships within the psychotherapeutic endeavour – a viewpoint which, by being almost ubiquitously taken for granted within contemporary psychoanalysis, may be overshadowed by more ‘exciting’ developments in psychoanalytic technique and applications. The forthcoming papers bring us back to the fundamental nature of human bonding, how this becomes manifest in the bi-directional field of communications between patient and therapist, and how intrapsychic disturbances can be healed through interpersonal interactions.

In ‘Team splitting and the “borderline personality”: A relational reframe’, Huw Green addresses the wide-spread concept of team splitting. Drawing on both the British and American psychoanalytic literature, Green reviews the historical development, from Tom Main’s (1957) classic paper The Ailment, Isabel Menzies Lyth’s (1960) application of Melanie Klein’s ideas to the training of nurses in a general hospital, and the study by Stanton and Schwartz (1954) of the dynamics of an American psychotherapeutic hospital, to prevailing psychoanalytic explanations which centre around the idea that splits within the team are the result of the defensive processes of projection and projective identification from borderline patients. These formulations, he suggests, have led to simplistic accounts where the patient is blamed, and neglect the contributions from staff, as well as patients, to the team’s pathological dynamics. He critiques this viewpoint from contemporary dialectical, feminist and social-justice perspectives and focuses on understanding team splitting within a psychoanalytic relational framework influenced by object relations theory in which projections are not seen as unidirectional from specific types of disturbed patients ‘manipulating’ or ‘doing’ something to the staff team, but understood as also arising from the predispositions and unconscious conflicts and motivations of team members, both indi