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To commemorate the 40th year of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy the current Editor, Paul Barrows, has compiled a selection of notable papers to represent the creative work of the Journal from its beginnings up to the 1980s. Another collection will probably follow representing later texts of importance that may well owe their origins and inspiration to these earlier papers. This year also marks the release by the publisher of the first Cumulative Index - another indispensable aid to surveying the history of the Journal.
The criteria for choosing these ‘key’ papers were (a) their inaccessibility to a contemporary readership due to the absence of back copies or having not been reprinted elsewhere (b) the frequency with which a text has been cited for teaching and learning purposes, and of course (c) their being distinguished contributions in their own right.
As the Editor states, such a commemorative edition not only celebrates the international success of the Journal today but also the growth in the profession of child psychotherapy itself.
The book is divided into three sections covering theoretical, clinical and applied contributions. There is a general introduction and, in addition, each section begins with its own introduction by the Editor that reviews the chapters so thoughtfully and comprehensively as to make the job of the reviewer almost unnecessary. However the Editor raises several interesting issues for the reader to ponder and one of these is the observation that nowadays there is a greater convergence between different theoretical schools of child psychotherapy concerning certain aspects of their work.
I would like to shape my review around this subject as it bears directly on some of the papers chosen and on the historical dimension to the life of the Journal itself. The Journal first appeared at a time when conceptual and technical differences between Anna Freudian and Kleinian ‘schools’ of child analysis in Britain were starkly drawn. Both ‘schools’ we