Editorial

It was in December 1963 that the first issue of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy was published, and it is a privilege for us to find ourselves as co-editors of such a distinguished Journal for this, its 40^th Anniversary.

In all that time the main focus of the Journal, which has given it such a distinctive role, has been the presentation of detailed accounts of clinical work. This tradition is both maintained but also extended with the present collection of papers, which concentrate on work with the under-fives. Since the previous special edition on under-fives work in 1992 (vol.18, no. 1) this has been increasingly an area of special interest for child psychotherapists, overlapping with the growing infant mental health field to which the profession has contributed considerably.

Part of that contribution lies in the development of a model of brief infant-parent psychotherapy such as described by both Hopkins and Miller in that earlier number (Hopkins 1992; Miller 1992). In the present edition we begin with Barrows taking something of an overview of this area of parent-infant work and trying to define what it is that we are trying to change when working with parents and their infants and how this might be conceptualized meta-psychologically.

This is followed by Likierman who provides us with a very detailed and thought-provoking account of the kind of work that currently takes place as part of the Tavistock model of brief under-fives counselling, together with some new thoughts on postnatal depression. Klitzing's account also provides a vivid example of such work from a European context, but this time it also includes a move to working with the individual child as well. It is interesting to note that in all three of these papers there is particular attention given to the importance of the father's role and the significance of triads, rather than a more exclusive concentration on dyadic relationships.

Carling's paper reminds us of the importance of also being able to off