Editorial

In the UK, many trainees have NHS-funded posts and are able to undertake their training in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service where their training needs are overseen by the service supervisor and, as Margaret Rustin points out, ‘Service supervision has become a central feature of the training of child psychotherapists in the UK’. Her paper reports on the work of a research workshop set up to explore the task and its complexities. The workshop ran for several years of monthly meetings and was attended by a highly experienced group of supervisors. It was able to address the many issues arising out of the supervisor's complex role in supporting, managing and supervising the trainee. The article also looks at the potential problems inherent in the supervisor's role given that the trainee is also being supervised by the Training School's supervisor. The movement between a trainee and the supervisor managing ‘seamless’ relationships or split ones makes for fascinating reading. This is the first time the Journal of Child Psychotherapy has published an article in this area and is a significant contribution to the profession. We hope that it will also stimulate further contributions on the role of the supervisor working in different contexts.

The 2008 essay prize, awarded in 2009, was for a qualifying paper. We received a large number of entries and, in this issue, we are publishing two excellent papers that reflect rather different ways of working. Both therapists (in Strati's words) think of the therapeutic task as lying in ‘capturing the hope that maybe someone could manage and process what feels unbearable and unthinkable, but also the fear that no one can or will.’

Katerina Strati's paper, ‘Peek-a-boo. How can you be there? Analytic work with a severely traumatised two-and-a-half-year-old girl’, asks some difficult and interesting questions about working with very early trauma. Phoebe had witnessed her mother killing her father, Phoebe's grandfather. ‘While it