Child psychotherapy and research

Child psychotherapy and research, edited by Nick Midgley, Jan Anderson, Eve Grainger, Tanja Nesic-Vuckovic and Cathy Urwin, London, Routledge, 2009, 248 pp., £22.99

This is a welcome and truly timely publication at a point when we need to arm ourselves with the evidence that has accumulated and to be able to communicate our findings. This book may stand as a milestone in the profession, marking a new era in relation to how we think about and approach research in child psychotherapy. Increasingly, in any service or private practice, we need to hold what I have come to call a ‘research state of mind’ in which audit, single case studies, involvement in service-based studies or larger profession-based studies become a mainstream activity. This contributes to the validity of what we know, what we do and may raise further questions for exploration. It is after all, this openness, curiosity and sense of discovery that is embedded in psychoanalytic thinking and clinical work.

The book opens with an eloquent Preface by Peter Hobson, in which he succinctly outlines the potential tensions between the aims of research and the special conditions, practice and power of child psychotherapy. He states (p. xvi):

What research needs to offer – and what this book offers – are creative ways of capturing relevant aspects of the things that child psychotherapists do and observe, and/or what child psychotherapists have discerned to be important in and beyond the consulting room, in such a way as to make these amenable to public awareness and subject to scientific evaluation.

What is helpful about the book is that it is so clearly structured, gathering together seminal papers which reflect different types of research that have taken place, delineating different methodologies used and introducing us to the diversity of research that has developed in the field.

The Introduction describes the contemporary context of child psychotherapy and the challenges we all face. The editors themselves state