This volume arrives in the post COVID climate and on the eve of the 9th International CAT conference when we are returning to Finland where the first international CAT conference took place twenty years ago in Valamo in 2003. The theme of the conference is looking back and looking forward and this volume has echoes of this especially with the contribution from Frank Margison in reviewing the first and second edition of the Ryle and Kerr Introducing CAT books. We may also be looking back and looking forward to the strange warp of time during the pandemic. The COVID struggles list by Mayer and Jefferis touches on this.

 

Interest in CAT has grown in the past twenty years. From its first development in the UK and then Finland, Ireland, Greece and Spain it has a growing following in Australia and New Zealand, Italy, Netherlands, India, Malta, Chile, and interest in France and Switzerland.

 

It is six years since the first issue of this journal. Thirty-six peer reviewed articles and nineteen book reviews later we are pleased to have a rich and diverse body of work on CAT, freely available online to readers around the world. For future issues, we hope to produce one issue annually and we look forward to a variety of contributions – whether reports on additions to the evidence base for CAT; case studies that either illustrate the range of CAT practice or introduce innovations to the approach; or articles that explore the applications of a CAT understanding the wider relational context to psychotherapy and mental health. A great variety of approaches to psychotherapy have been established along parallel or divergent tracks to CAT and we have partly seen the cognitive analytic understanding used as a framework for engaging differ- ent techniques and ways of working.

 

Having carried the journal on a voluntary basis for these years the two founding editors Ian Kerr and Steve Potter are now extending a warm welcome to a bigger team and a collect- ive approach to sharing the editorial load. Welcome to Anna Laws from the northeast of England, Claire Regan from Ireland and Rita Toli from Greece. We are delighted to have their contribution and equally delighted to welcome Elaine Martin the new chairperson of ICATA to join our editorial group. It is a healthy step to handing over the journal to the next generation.

 

We continue to appreciate the support from ICATA and hope the journal plays an active part in its work as a federation of countries where CAT is practised and developing. We now have Psych Info registration approval which is a step for referencing and are seeking to consolidate this aspect of the journal as a source for referencing and research by getting the journal indexed more effectively on search engines and optimised for being listed on academic indexing search engines. We are committed to keeping the journal freely available online. Some print copies are available for library use or reference.

 

Turning to this issue, we are pleased to have a thoughtful outsider contribution from our invited guest, Giancarlo DiMaggio who has written of the common factors across integrative and relational therapies with his article Hope Perspective Action.

 

Rowan Tinlin shows the versatility of CAT in her enquiry into Mapping sexual diversity using Cognitive Analytic Therapy: a qualitative, cooperative enquiry with the LGBTQ+ community. Rowan’s contribution opens a space for thinking along CAT lines about dominant and pluralistic narratives of gender, sexuality and diversity.

 

Lee Crothers and colleagues offer a relational model of consultation for relational trauma using a Cognitive Analytic Therapy approach to secondary consultation to services that help young  people in Out of Home Care. Mark Dawson and colleagues report on the challenges and results of a study of measuring the effectiveness of Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) in a Personality Disorder Service. Irene Elia has done a CAT outcome study of private practice which offers food for thought about the distinctiveness of CAT in that sector. Future articles might look comparatively at how private practice is positioned in relation to public sector provision where and if it is available.

 

Several papers report on work related to or affected by the pandemic. Claire Mayer and Steve Jefferis describe their work in developing and evaluating the Covid Struggles List which is a checklist that has echoes of the psychotherapy file but for different times and contexts. Two short papers are very welcome more as research notes to highlight the value of small-scale routine evaluation and research built into practice. Siobain Bonfield writes about space to think and reflect during the pandemic and Eirini Vasiliki writes up a study interrupted by Covid but still bringing some helpful insight into the use of self in evaluating a one-day relational skills training with a Community Mental Health Team.

 

In the selection of book reviews, we are grateful for Frank Margison’s extensive comparative review of the first and second edition of the Ryle and Kerr book. As an invited review it does something more than review the book but also take stock of the CAT model. In the same vein we are pleased to have reviews of the Introduction to CAT in Greece by Iannis Vlachos who has done so much to develop CAT in that country to the point of strength it now has and of the distinctive book by Marie-Anne Bernardy of the use of CAT in France with rich case studies and examples reviewed by Annie Nehmad.

 

Book reviews are concluded with a compelling account of Nick Trotton’s book on Wild Therapy. Nick Barnes in reviewing the book introduces a CAT perspective on its application to therapeutic work in the Scottish Highlands.

 

We as an editorial group learn from our contributors and our own efforts with writing. Finding words that bring clarity in complex times means we meet words that are troublesome in good and bad ways. One of the editors Steve Potter offers an opening contribution to some troublesome words in the CAT lexicon. It is invitation for further contributions in future issues.

 

Looking back and looking forward may be a false division. It might be something nautical like steady as she goes and holding to the pragmatic, relational and integrative fabric of what might be called a socio-bio-psycho-but with-humanity approach.