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Psychoanalytic Inquiry is a ‘Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals’, published in New Jersey, with a largely American readership. This volume is entitled, Child Psychotherapy: A report from the Tavistock Clinic. Child psychotherapy is not a recognized discrete profession in North America and dedicating a whole number to it and to the Tavistock is an interesting venture, secured, I surmise, by the goodwill established by Dilys Daws in her international contacts. She and her co-editor, Judith Green Loose, have collected a set of interesting and representative papers. These give a comprehensive view of the child psychotherapy training and the rich clinical, theoretical and applied work that has been developed by the graduates of the training which was established 50 years prior to the date of publication. Because of the success of this issue, extra copies have recently been reprinted.
When the journal was first published, I wondered, given my long working experience of the Tavistock training, if it would provide anything new; and then having found it rich and useful, feared I might be biased. As I was working in South Africa at the time, I was interested in the reaction of an audience who did not know at first hand the child psychotherapy training or indeed the Tavistock. The multidisciplinary groups in which we discussed some of the papers considered them inspiring and admired the way that complicated concepts were conveyed clearly and without resort to jargon. They found cause for hope in the accounts of the many small beginnings, which were nurtured into impressive developments.
Margaret Rustin's chapter on ‘Philosophy and practice’ puts the Tavistock training in the context of the development of the profession in the UK and details its history, noting all the important figures who developed the training. This should be of interest to current trainees as well as to practising therapists who might be familiar with the Tavistock of their training era, but to w