Editorial

While the core work of the child psychotherapist remains the practice of individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the numbers of children who can be helped in this way must remain relatively limited. It is, in part, in recognition of this constraint that child psychotherapists have sought to apply psychoanalytic insights in various contexts beyond the consulting room.

The collection of papers gathered in this Special Edition on Applied Work bears witness to the fruits of that enterprise and demonstrates its value. The paper by Canham applies a psychoanalytic paradigm to group work with children with particular reference to the work of Rosenfeld. There has been a long tradition of such group work in the profession, often based in primary schools, though it has been relatively little written about (see, however, Reid, 1999). Canham's paper demonstrates the value of this approach and implicit in his account is the sense that group work is not simply a means of increasing the number of children who can be seen at any one time but rather, has its own very particular value. Perhaps this should not be surprising since it is often the child's difficulty in managing within a group setting that prompts their referral.

The following three papers, in a sense, pursue this theme of ‘groups’ and ‘gangs’. Jackson moves on to consider the wider ‘group’ in which children function, namely the school, while Sprince describes her work in a therapeutic community where it is the explicit function of the ‘group’ to be the agent of therapy. Emanuel, on the other hand, describes a project in which initially the focus was on the provision of individual therapy to children in care, but where it rapidly became apparent that this made little sense without addressing the dynamics of the larger, organizational ‘group’ in which those children found themselves. All three authors chose to work indirectly through providing consultation to the staff, and the main theme to emerge from each paper is the ce