The response to the first issue of INSIDE OUT – some of which appears on the Letters page of this issue – was both encouraging and sobering. Many people were delighted to see the emergence of such a publication in Ireland and expressed their willingness to support it in its early development. Others were disappointed: INSIDE OUT did not appear to offer what they were looking for.
For the Editorial Committee it was back to the drawing board. While we cannot obviously hope to please all of the people all of the time, we do need to decide at whom we are aiming. Is it possible to produce a publication that is of interest to both practitioners and consumers of psychotherapy or will that leave us dangling ineffectually between the proverbial two stools? Can we combine a networking, keeping-in-touch function with a more hard-hitting, thought- provoking, challenging approach? What, in fact, are our boundaries? We need to define ourselves more clearly and in a way that will both say who we are now while still allowing us room to grow and evolve. We are working at such an identity and for the time being at least we are dropping the subtitle – The Journal of Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy in Ireland – which was perhaps over-optimistically conceived in the euphoria of actually getting a publication off the ground. For now we arc simply INSIDE OUT – A Quarterly Publication for Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy.
Wc would ask you not merely to bear with as in our infancy but actively to join with us by sending in your articles, letters, book reviews and comments, both praising and criticising. And of course, don’t forget to take out your subscription to INSIDE OUT.