No abstract

The 2003 edition of Forum celebrates diversity. The papers within cover a wide sweep: across countries, across cultures and languages, across disciplines, from different corners of our psychotherapy discipline. We are delighted to include keynote papers and other presentations from the conference in Christchurch. These papers give us rich reading and thinking from many perspectives - psychiatry, individual and group psychotherapy, history and culture, art, ethics and neuroscience. We have as well papers that pick up the conference theme, the ebb and flow of relationship. We include a formal tribute to Roy Muir and a paper dedicated to him. Its author, Angela Stupples, trained in child psychotherapy with Roy and Liz Muir and her paper opened the day seminar held at The Ashburn Clinic in Dunedin earlier this year to honour Roy's life and work.

This paper outlines the formal aspects, academic and clinical, of a three year training in psychotherapy offered in a psychiatric hospital which functions as a therapeutic community. The trainee's adjustment to the community is described, with reference to the overlap and intersection with the patient's experience in the community. Consideration is given to individual and group processes within the entire community. Erikson's concept of developmental stages is used, as well as a paper by Baird Brightman,to examine how crises in the training experience are managed by the trainee.