A Description of Some Aspects of the Clinical Work at the Child Development Center, New York*

The Child Development Center in New York is a mental health clinic for pre-latency children and their families. It addresses itself to the emotional and developmental disorders of the first years of life. Its approach is psychoanalytic. Its setting is inter-disciplinary: child analysts, child psychiatrists, nursery-school teachers, psychiatric social workers, clinical and research psychologists and a paediatrician collaborate in the study and treatment of a selected group of children. Because of the demand for service in a large community like New York, we have been forced to consider whether to respond to its total needs or to give treatment of choice to a few children as intensively as possible. The decision was made some years ago to follow the latter course, and to share our experience with the community through professional publications, the outcome of research, and through the training of personnel. What we have attempted to set up is, in effect, a laboratory model of a clinic for pre-school children.

Training has always been important at the Center. When the Center started, it had to develop an in-service programme for its own professional staff. Today it offers two-year post-graduate “fellowship” programmes to psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and nursery-school teachers.

The Child Development Center is administratively a part of the Jewish Board of Guardians, a beneficiary of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York. Among its additional sources of income are the Greater New York Fund and the New York City Community Mental Health Board. Research projects are supported by grants from the government and from foundations. The Center also charges fees on a sliding scale from a maximum, which is comparable to the fees of other schools and of private practice, to a minimum of no fee or, rather, of payment waived.

Despite our affiliation, both intake of patients and selection of staff are non-sectarian and interracial; our intake is,