Editorial

Although the sexual and violent abuse of children is a current topical issue, it has been a concern at the Centre ever since the days of the War Nurseries. The victims of wartime conditions and the post-war work with the child survivors of the Concentration Camps, carried out by Anna Freud, Alice Goldberger and their colleagues, led to a number of influential studies.

Restraints placed upon us by the need to preserve our patients' rights to confidentiality have precluded the publication of certain analytic casework which has contributed more than anything else to our understanding of the nature of the intrapsychic consequences of child abuse. It has however provided essential source material on which to base a psychoanalytic approach to the distressing legal issues facing abused children and their families and which have been extensively discussed by Anna Freud and Professors Goldstein and Solnit. The therapeutic investigation and treatment by members of the Centre with victims of abuse has enlarged the psychoanalytic understanding of the fate of these experiences in the interaction with later developmental processes.