Editorial

Abstract

The papers in this issue represent a range of approaches we, as therapists, adopt when writing about our work within the constraints of publishing ethically in the digital age. As I write this, we at the Journal of Child Psychotherapy are organising a symposium on the contemporary challenges of publishing clinical material, and I want to highlight some of the issues we will explore at the symposium, by commenting on that aspect of each paper, as I introduce them here. In this issue there are a number of papers about work with children with autism. We have the final part of Robin Holloway's triptych, and Sheila Levi's two-part narrative of the intensive treatment of a young boy diagnosed with autism at two years of age. These papers demonstrate how richly repaid we are when we engage closely with the details of clinical phenomena. These papers celebrate child psychotherapists’ deep curiosity and commitment to our cases, and what we learn from our patients. We are not able to publish as many of these sorts of case studies as we did in the past because of the need to seek informed consent, which isn't always appropriate or possible to obtain. However, in these three papers, informed consent was given. In Sheila Levi's paper, the patient was a young man when he read about his treatment all those years before. His mother reported that he appreciated reading it a great deal, but one wonders what, more specifically, he appreciated and what motivated him to allow his story to be shared in print. Holloway's patient was still in treatment at the time consent was sought. The complexities of this situation were touched upon in the first of the three papers, but you sense when reading these papers that the treatment, including the discussions around consent, was a collaborative endeavour. We will find out more when Holloway expands on the vicissitudes of this experience in his presentation at the symposium. What we do know is that this paper is alive with his patient ‘Sam’, who leaps out of the pages through the many drawings he consented to share. However, I think this also has something to do with the way Holloway manages to present his patient as a whole person, rather than a collection of pathological organisations. The way he uses subheadings to signal that he is interrupting ‘Sam's’ story with what he terms ‘theoretical interludes’ is part of this honouring of the patient's experience. Holloway ends his triptych with a review of the various attempts psychoanalytic theory has made to formulate autism and its aetiology. I find it a particularly lively and engaging exposition. The first of Sheila Levi's papers focuses on the use young ‘Tao’ made of intensive psychotherapy to help him relinquish his autistic defences. Her second paper explores her work with the family and network to support them in loosening their investment in his autism diagnosis. Levi’s argument about what it was in the parental couple’s relationship that supported development is likely to strike many of our readers as heteronormative JOURNAL OF CHILD PSYCHOTHERAPY 2022, VOL. 48, NO. 1, 1–5 https://doi.org/10.1080/0075417X.2022.2044371