Editorial

The papers in this issue of this journal collectively illustrate how meaningful empirical research in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, both quantitative and qualitative, can be conducted in real-life settings without huge resources. The contribution of a psychoanalytic approach to working in mental health services within the public sector is amply demonstrated in these articles in their focus on treatments underpinned by a psychoanalytic model, and in challenging the biological supremacy in the understanding of the aetiology and treatment of psychiatric disorders.

The first two papers add to the existing literature, some of which has been previously published in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, on a relatively recently developed short-term psychodynamic therapy, dynamic interpersonal therapy (DIT), which has been at the forefront of the expansion of evidence-based talking therapies available in the UK National Health Service (NHS) by its inclusion within Improving Access to Psychological Therapy (IAPT) services in primary care settings. These two articles complement each other in that the first provides preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of this treatment model based on changes in symptoms measured by outcome monitoring, and the second focuses at the level of the individual patient in exploring their personal experiences of receiving therapy.

In ‘Development of dynamic interpersonal therapy in complex care (DITCC): a pilot study’, Amra Rao and her colleagues describe the development of the DIT model in working with patients presenting with complex depression, and the results of a pilot study which found preliminary evidence of its effectiveness in this patient population in an improvement in wellbeing and distress and declines in depression and anxiety. Significantly, outcomes were measured on a session by session basis, a research method that is often viewed with suspicion by psychoanalytic clinicians due to fears that this breaches the boundaries of the therapeuti