Editorial

This second Volume of 2019, the year of the 70th Anniversary of the Association of Child Psychotherapists, brings a range of papers that show the breadth and distance travelled since then – and the ongoing preoccupations and complex efforts to understand our patients better. Papers in this edition come from authors working in Greece, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States. The papers present perspectives on varied themes: the psychic work of the therapist; the different ways the developing mind works, and doesn’t work so well; the need and desire to research and extend our clinical and therapeutic understanding; the importance of the supervisory relationship in aiding our development as clinicians and thinkers; and the important question of our relationship to the socio-political environment and how it is expressed and explored in the therapeutic relationship. As well as our Book Reviews and Research Digest, we are also including a Commentary that looks back at our connections to past papers from Volume 1, as a way of marking the 70th Anniversary of the ACP.

We would like first to acknowledge how much work has been done by this edition’s contributors in working to establish consent for their papers to be published (this has been especially noted by some authors in the footnotes). We hope that it will be encouraging for potential contributors to know that more than one author, when requested by us to confirm a transparent agreement for the work to be published, went back to the family some time after treatment had ended, and were able to gain consent. Some authors found a way to create ‘composite’ descriptions of patients, or ‘thick disguise’ as described by Gabbard, while others had addressed consent for publications through research protocols from the outset. We are working to ensure that our standards for consent are respectful of our patients, and we are keen to continue to find ways to support authors in finding ways to share experience and knowledge in