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Object relations-orientated couples and family psychotherapy was brought to Sydney by Dr Charles Enfield when he accepted the position of Head of Child Psychiatry at the Royal Alexandra Children's Hospital in 1975. Charles had been at the Tavistock Clinic when the traditional child guidance model became challenged by Bowlby's acknowledgement of the significance of the external other (particularly the family) in a child's life. Charles had been supervised by John Bowlby and, along with John Byng-Hall, had been in a family therapy study group headed by Dr Freda Martin. At that time, both Harry Guntrip and Henry Dicks were active in the department and greatly influenced the group's thinking, as did Isca Wittenberg. The radical idea of the family as patient was one of the new directions this group explored.
With this shift in philosophy and thinking about family psychotherapy, Charles set up the Child and Family Psychiatry Department of the Children's Hospital, which continued to function as a centre of excellence for the application of object relations ideas to child and family problems for twenty years, until the mid-1990s. Through links with community health facilities, notably the Jesmond Street Child and Family Service, other groups of professionals were exposed to these ideas.
In 1997, a group of eleven clinicians, all of whom had been supervised by Charles, formed the New South Wales Institute for Family Psychotherapy (NSWIFP). Charles was the founding president and maintains an active supervision group, which provides an opportunity for some of this group to carry these ideas further into their private practices.
Also in 1997, Noela Byrne, Jenny Berg, and Penny Jools established Calliope, a private clinic that specialised in the treatment of couples and families, and gave the Institute a de facto home. The peer supervision group based at Calliope became interested in the changes they observed in couple and family functioning that occurred in longer-term work, in pa