New discoveries in child psychotherapy: findings from qualitative research: edited by Margaret Rustin and Michael Rustin, London, Routledge, 2019, 350 pp., £34.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-367-24410-1

This book grew out of the Tavistock professional doctorate programme for child psychotherapists, which Margaret and Michael Rustin were closely involved in while the course was linked to the University of East London. The book consists of eleven papers by

graduates of the programme: it includes an appendix listing each of the nearly 90 dissertations that have so far been produced. These cover a huge area, ranging from a looked-after child’s experience of transitions, boundaries and thresholds, to the integration of psychoanalytic theory and child development research; from a single case study of infant observation, to the therapeutic observation of a baby in foster care, or a comparison between process notes and tape recordings of sessions.

As Michael Rustin has written elsewhere (Rustin & Armstrong, 2021), the book’s editors – and the overall programme – were informed by the belief that the generation of new psychoanalytic knowledge takes place through the processing of data arising out of clinical work. This is in contrast to the results of outcome research, which addresses a very different set of questions and makes use of different methodologies. The programme has not excluded outcome research or quantitative methods: some of the dissertations (that by Janet Philps, for instance) provide examples of the creative adaptation of mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to the particular requirements of a given project, while Miriam Creaser’s comparison of process notes and tape recordings is based on transcriptions from the IMPACT quantitative outcome study (Goodyer et al., 2017), which compared Brief Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with CBT and Treatment as Usual for adolescent depression. But, as Michael Rustin emphasises, quantitative outcome studies, which generate knowledge of a particular and necessary kind, are long, costly, and beyond the scope of individual researchers. Qualitative studies, which are often regarded as inferior, can generate knowledge of a