Editorial

This issue marks the final instalment of the Journal's 50^th volume. First appearing in 1963, 14 years after the founding of the ACP, it began as a ‘“local”, in house affair’ (Barrows, 2004, p. xii), developing into a leading Taylor & Francis publication, with international readers and contributors. There is no doubt that for ACP child psychotherapists the Journal holds an important position, historically and currently. As Editor, I am often struck by the strong feelings it evokes in fellow ACP members – whether of affection, guilt, or admiration! Despite early issues being at times hard to come by, we are fortunate that the back catalogue is now only a click away, as from 2007 all previous issues were made available online. I have no doubt that we have a previous Journal Editor to thank for this, along with many other aspects of how the Journal runs today.

In the foreword to ‘Key papers from the Journal of Child Psychotherapy’ (Barrows, 2004), Maria Rhode writes about ‘the excitement with which my fellow trainees and I in the late 1960s and early 1970s opened each issue’ and how the papers within the pages ‘conveyed the sense that fundamental issues related to the practice of child psychotherapy were being thought through for the first time’ (p. vii). I recognise the feeling Rhode describes, and also the style she attributes to early JCP papers. In a recent conversation with Miranda Passey, a member of the Journal Group, she described the papers as sometimes ‘being written with quite a degree of certainty, like brave little boats being sent out to sea’ (personal communication). This may be characteristic of a fledgling discipline, and though I imagine there are ideas and attitudes shared in early volumes of the Journal that we would not stand by today (see Eriksen's review paper within this issue for some interesting examples), they no doubt reflect the development of our profession and our changing society.

Although a lot of time and effort goes into producing the Jo