On ‘The Hampstead Bulletin’

The first issue of the Hampstead Bulletin is being sent out to its readers in the hope that it will acquire and maintain a place for itself in spite of the numerous publications which serve the field already. In fact, the Bulletin of the Hampstead Clinic, in view of its restricted circle of contributors, is not meant to compete with any other psychoanalytic journal, just as the Hampstead Clinic, due to its very special working arrangements, never meant to compete with any other psychoanalytic Society or Institute.

The Hampstead Clinic was founded after the second world war to give substance to Freud's pronouncement that ‘children have become the main subject of psychoanalytic research and have thus replaced in importance the neurotics on whom its studies began’. Written as it was in 1925 (in a Foreword to Aichhorn's book Wayward Youth) this sentence needs to be taken as prophetic rather than factual. Indeed, even now, after a lapse of half a century, the analytic study of childhood has not been accorded the role which Freud envisaged for it in the mainstream of psychoanalytic activities. It is only in subsidiary institutions, such as the Hampstead Clinic, that to all intents and purposes children have been substituted for adults as the main subjects of analytic research; that the direct study of infantile drives, urges and tendencies has replaced their reconstruction; that the developmental pathways from immaturity to maturity are shown up in progression rather than in regression; that applied work in the children's field is not considered to be of secondary importance but as a fertile, all-important source of new insights and unsuspected findings; in short, that with the child as subject and target of analytic effort within and outside the treatment situation, a way is opened towards the construction of a psychology of normal mental growth, including all the hazards, inconsistencies and failures which bedevil human development.

Committed to work of this nature during