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I am writing this by invitation as a response to Michael Rustin’s paper in order to bring some further ideas into the discussion. In my professional role I talk to a significant number of psychotherapists, both adult and child trained, about the place of research in practice and in trainings. I work with students on doctoral and master’s programmes and see the issues which are often raised for them in addressing research ideas for the first time, having myself travelled the same route from clinician to academic. Just watching students struggling to frame a viable research question that could then be turned into a feasible research project with a recognisable outcome teaches one a great deal about how complex it is to become research-minded, even for those who are already motivated and keen.
There are many child psychotherapists who are steeped in research activities who could respond from a very different skill and experience set – and indeed I hope that they will add their voices to the discussion. I am aware that I am not firmly in the (perhaps imagined) mainstream of the profession, and that there is much recent activity, particularly in terms of training and research, that is creating considerable movement in the profession. There is perhaps an increasing divide between those training now and those who are long qualified, so what is relevant to one section of our membership may well be outdated for others. However, the debate about research is one that could and should affect us all and one about which we all have views.
Rustin’s paper provides an extremely useful and thought-provoking account of how research and child psychotherapy have typically related to one another. As he describes, much of this history is one shared with psychoanalysis in general, but in more recent times there have been a number of ways in which the two fields have followed somewhat different trajectories. Child psychotherapy, as an NHS profession, has been obliged to take up the issue of o