Editorial 29(2)

We find ourselves, systemically and personally, living through complex and challenging times which increasingly make demands on our ability to address and manage contemporary issues but also offer the opportunity for us to take stock and review previously taken for granted ways of doing things. This applies no less to professional issues which confront us daily in a world that is changing constantly. The papers in this issue offer some thought-provoking challenges as to how we might confront the new internal and external worlds that are becoming increasingly demanding. We begin this edition with Farhad Dalal’s talk ‘It’s not in the bottle: research, ethics & psychotherapy’. We have for some time been in thrall to the concept of being an evidence-based profession which has imposed a discrete format, if not structure, on our profession and a need to ensure that our interventions meet the framework of what constitutes an evidence base. We have, Dalal believes, sought ‘positivist credentials in order to become respectable members of the positivist scientific academy’. Dalal convincingly argues that these ‘positivist methodologies are unable, even in principle, to capture the intricacies of human exchange’ which are fundamental to processled therapies. We have been faced with a binary choice: objective knowledge versus subjective experience; the tangible versus the intangible. For positivists, and the foundation of an evidence base, ‘if something (cannot) be observed and measured then there (is) no proof that it exists . . . . . . only that which can be counted counts, and that which cannot be counted, is discounted’. It raises the question whether the notion of an evidence base is a ‘distortion of reality rather than a description of it’. Dalal intriguingly questions whether both experience and process, fundamental to the dynamic therapies, can be captured within a positivist/evidence-based framework. How can, he asks, we study the subjective using a method that has been ‘purged of subjectivity?’ Intriguingly, Dalal argues that, via positivist protocols, the regulators have set standards that favour the ‘fiscal interests of . . . . industry, rather than the public that they are meant to protect’. Using psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, Dalal shows how ’regulatory and legislative capture’ have been a consequence of our profession attempting to fit into a model of scientific Psychodynamic Practice, 2023 Vol. 29, No. 2, 97–100, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753634.2023.2195302