Editorial

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of our publishers, Taylor & Francis, the Journal of Child Psychotherapy has inaugurated an Annual Essay Prize. This edition contains the winning paper, and future editions will feature other prize submissions. Diana Cant, the winner of the first Essay Prize, has written a paper describing her work with a child in a residential children's home. Cant delineates the progress of the work, the child's growing abilities and her move into foster care. As well as containing the careful and detailed case material that is, we believe, the hallmark of papers in the Journal, the paper also makes a strong case for close cooperation between the therapist and those in the child's extended network. In this way, Cant's clinical experience leads her to argue the need for changes in technique.

Jenny Kenrick's paper similarly encourages us to think about our technique when working with fostered and adopted children. After an overview of the literature about interpretation, Kenrick considers how the needs of fostered and adopted children may require an alteration in the way we frame our interpretations to them. By giving numerous vignettes which detail exactly what was said and the child's reaction to it, she helps the reader to truly grasp the subtleties of the points she is making.

At the centre of this edition, there is a collection of papers on the theme of imitation and identification. In what at first seemed to be a coincidence, two papers submitted to us addressed the same theoretical issues. It occurred to us that this might be a subject that was preoccupying therapists and influencing their work, and that it may be timely to have a ‘mini feature’ on the topic. Graham Shulman has revisited Gaddini's (1992) seminal paper ‘On imitation’. His close commentary enables those of us unfamiliar with the original to have a sense of its main points, but also opens up a discussion about some of its ambiguities and inconsistencies. This theoretical paper se