Finding a Way to the Child – Selected Clinical Papers 1983–2021, by Margaret Rustin, edited by Kate Stratton and Simon Cregeen, London and New York,  Routledge, 2023,  254 pp., £29.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-032-35156-8

To glance at the final section of this book, which lists Margaret Rustin’s publications from 1971-2020, is a dizzying experience, and a reminder of quite how productive and prolific she has been. For half a century, she held pre-eminent management and teaching positions at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, as well as helping the profession develop nationally. For many of us, she has been a steady, benign maternal presence, and at the same time a formidable intellectual force in the field of child psychotherapy. Selecting the papers for this book must have been a difficult task, but the editors have made a coherent and informed choice. The papers are grouped into four sections: The scope of child and adolescent psychotherapy; Assessment in child psychotherapy; The particular needs of young people growing up in foster or adoptive homes, and, lastly, Working with parents. The selection includes clinical papers taken from Rustin’s own practice, framed by discussions of relevant and illuminating theoretical perspectives.

I recommend this book to those who wonder what child psychotherapists spend their time doing. Margaret Rustin has a particular skill in communicating complex ideas in such a way as to make them accessible as well as a pleasure to read about. The papers will be helpful for those embarking on a career in child psychotherapy, but no less for those who have been working for years in CAMHS services or independent practice with troubled children and young people. Rustin’s remarkable clarity of thinking is mirrored in the lucid prose of the papers, so that the reader is immediately engaged and alert. She is reassuringly open about her own struggles in clinical work, and unflinching in her description of the complex internal and external emotional worlds of children and adolescents in severe distress.

The author’s preface, recounting her own route to training, emphasises the crucial importance of both her personal analysis and of her outstanding teac