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In 1949, the Association of Child Psychotherapists came into being. Following a lively discourse represented by study weekends and conference events during the ACP’s first decade, and after the establishment of a regular Bulletin that began being published for ACP members, the Journal of Child Psychotherapy came into being fourteen years later. The first edition came off the press in 1963, and as a way of recognising the 70th anniversary of the ACP, this current edition of the Journal looks back at some of the themes that had emerged in that first Volume, in an effort to think back to the journey we have travelled since then. We therefore consider here excerpts from a small selection of papers from that very first Volume, which had spanned the years from 1963–1966.
The material we are focussing on is of course considered today from our vantage point of the early part of the 21st century. The exploration that follows, based on our reading of these papers, is therefore free of the preconceptions related to theoretical orientation or status in the community that might have informed the readers of these articles at the time they were first published. There will inevitably also be gaps in our knowledge as contemporary readers, so a dialogue with the readership of the Journal relating to these papers, and others from our publication over the past 50 years, will be very welcome through the pages of the 2019 editions.
It was a challenge to establish the basis on which to choose the papers to explore in this brief commentary. There are papers in this first Volume that remain significant works for the child psychotherapy profession from all theoretical orientations. They include Edna O’Shaughnessy’s ‘The absent object’; Michael Fordham’s ‘Notes on the transference and its management in a schizoid child’; ‘Donald Winnicott’s ‘Becoming deprived as a fact’; and Anna Freud’s ‘Interactions between nursery school and child guidance clinic’. But what is striking in that first Volume i