Children and the Law

Anna Freud was always fascinated by family law and by the requirement of those responsible for its administration to take account of childhood needs as they were changed, modified and even transformed in the course of development. She was conscious too of the role of the mother as the first law-giver and the ways in which external precepts, proscriptions and examples became internalized and gave the child a sense of inner direction. It was this that made the work between Joseph Goldstein and Jay Katz at Yale of such interest to her and that led eventually to the collaboration between Solnit, Goldstein and herself in their books Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, Before the Best Interests of the Child, and in a third volume, completed after her death with the help of Sonja Goldstein, In the Best Interests of the Child. It is fitting, on this centenary of her birth, that the address by Sir John Balcombe should be summarized in these pages.

It may be argued that the books need updating since the law changes constantly and fresh examples are so often needed in casting light on contemporary legal practice. But the principles themselves do not change in their essentials, and it is those that are expressed with unmatched clarity in these books.

A recent development would, I believe, have been of the greatest interest to Anna Freud. In 1994, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, who was an advisor to the Portman Clinic and the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, was instrumental in bringing about a meeting between psychoanalysts there and others of like mind, and the success of the encounter encouraged Mr Justice Thorpe (now Lord Justice Thorpe) to explore the feasibility of a meeting between judges in family law and child psychiatrists who advise them. The remarkable energy, together with the enthusiasm of Donald Campbell and Dr Anne Zachary at the Institute, resulted in an extended weekend residential conference held at Dartington Hall in Devon, in which