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As usual for our journal, in this issue we have done our best to collect a variety of interesting papers centered around a specific topic, thus documenting not only the richness of approaches that characterizes our field, but also its intellectual roots and its continuing contribution to our contemporary cultural debate.
As we learned from Philip Aries’ 1962 still classic Centuries of childhood, the concept of childhood is a social construction that emerged very slowly in the course of modern history. Starting with Freud’s 1909 treatment of Little Hans, from early on psychoanalysis contributed to a new knowledge of children’s basic needs and to the treatment of their psychological problems. Through the Hampstead War Nurseries, Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham continued in London the practical work of applied psychoanalysis which they had already started in Vienna. These experiences still represent one of the main historical roots of the field of analytic pedagogics, the development of which Helmwart Hierdeis (2016) recently reconstructed in his very well-written book Psychoanalytische Pädagogik – Psychoanalyse in der Pädagogik.
Another product of the war climate and its consequences upon the welfare of children was John Bowlby’s attachment theory, whose original formulation through the three classical articles “The nature of the child’s tie to his mother” (1958), “Grief and mourning in infancy and early childhood” (1960a), and “Separation anxiety” (1960b) represented such a big challenge to traditional analytic thinking that only in recent years has his point of view been at least partially accepted by the analytic community. In fact, it has been largely utilized in the field of empirical research and rediscovered in the new clinical approach to the process of mentalization pioneered by Peter Fonagy (see Fonagy & Bateman, 2006). This is what allowed the psychoanalyst Karl Heinz Brisch to use the title “John Bowlby (1907–1990) – ‘Der Bindungs-Psychoanalytiker’,” that