Editorial

It is some seventeen years since the publication of the pioneering work of Boston and Szur, Psychotherapy with Severely Deprived Children (Boston and Szur, 1983). This book brought together work that had been undertaken in the Fostering and Adoption Workshop at the Tavistock Clinic. The members of this workshop wished to explore whether children from very deprived backgrounds could benefit from individual psychotherapy. Previously it had been a widely held view that such children, having very little ego strength, were not suitable candidates and needed, rather, The Provision of Primary Experience (Docker-Drysdale, 1990) that they had lacked.

The work was extremely challenging and demanding upon the resilience of the therapists, but a body of experience gradually accrued that gave hope that these children could be reached and helped, particularly if the therapist could tackle their tendency to deprive themselves further by resisting help when this did become available (see Henry, 1974). It is these children - almost by definition some of the most disturbed and disturbing - who now typically form a large part of the child psychotherapist's caseload and they remain as difficult and challenging as ever. Much creative thinking has also gone on in the interim, trying to elucidate ways of helping them (for example, Alvarez, 1992). There has been a particular emphasis in this work on how technique and interpretation may need to be modified to take account of the deficits in the early life experience of these children, who have not had much chance to ‘be a kid’ in the sense we would normally think of.

It is, therefore, a pleasure to be able to publish the papers gathered in this volume which help to illustrate the ‘state of the art’ in psychoanalytic work with this group. The first three articles, by Juliet Hopkins, Judith Edwards and Debbie Hindle, focus on clinical work with children in stable placements (either adopted or, in one case, a child returned from foster-care to l