Editorial

Abstract

As child psychotherapists we are familiar with thinking about the influence of environmental factors in our clinical work. But what do we mean when we refer to the ‘external environment’, are we referring to the maternal, paternal, or family environment? Or are we referring to broader aspects, such as culture, class, race, racism, inequality and poverty, the impact of Brexit and immigration controls, wars and the climate emergency? A common experience many of us as child psychotherapists have faced, when raising such issues, is to be told that our focus has strayed away to the external world, when our attention, as psychoanalytic practitioners, should be on the internal world . . . There is also a wider question we are curious about and want to explore further: is there any meaningful division between internal and external in psychoanalytic thinking? How do we think of this division? And if we believe – as we do in the JCP – that the external and the political should be at the centre of our thinking, rather than an occasional ‘add on’, how do we ensure this is the case? Frosh and Baraitser (2008) (cited in Morgan, 2021) claim that it is an important political act to challenge the theoretical division of what phenomenologically cannot be divided as ‘the warp and the weft’ (p. 383) of the fabric of being. However, Morgan also puts forward Hoggett’s (2008) challenge to this, which is that ‘internal and external worlds, while overlapping and mutually constituting, are also irreducible to one another, each governed by its own rules of structure formation . . . the hyphen in psychosocial signifies a difference that cannot be dissolved’ (p. 383). Whatever each therapist’s position on this debate, all our work is inevitably done within the context of myriad psycho-social elements, coming from us, from our patients, and from the wider environments around us. We are keen to think both about why this is a challenging area, and how we can work towards improvements in our practice.