Editorial

This edition of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy contains an interesting collection of papers which show a number of the areas that child psychotherapists are preoccupied with at the moment. We see the characteristic of thoughtful professional work, with practice influencing theory, and problems in the consulting room leading the clinicians to revise their theories. We can note the way the authors often start from their individual experiences in the consulting room, and struggle with and muse about the impact of the child or the family on themselves. They then, over time, think further and more deeply about what has been going on, creating possible new ways of understanding both their experience, and how that experience relates to previous theories. For these clinicians this process has culminated in the papers which we are now able to read, many of which extend already accepted theoretical concepts.

In her paper Rhode shows just this mix of detailed clinical work and advances in theory. Although Rhode's paper arises out of her work with a particular patient population, the ideas within it can be extended to work with others. The impact of trauma is apparent here, as it is in the papers by Jackson and Emanuel. Rhode takes her ideas about the geometry of the mouth and nipple, and parallels this idea of the perpendicular with the nature of the paternal influence. This most interesting idea about the quality of the perpendicular and the bringing together, or not, of the maternal and paternal can also be seen in other papers in this volume where the role of the father, including the impact of father's absence, is examined closely.

Music's paper challenges some of our assumptions about what is implied by the terms ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’, and delineates how thoughts about these issues can influence our clinical practice. He disputes the traditional view that the father rescues the child from an over-close entanglement with the mother. He shows how maternal and paternal