Voices from the Anna Freud Centre

Anna Freud, a legend in her own time, is universally acknowledged as a foremost contributor to psychoanalytic theory and a pioneer in developing approaches to observation, assessment, and psychoanalytic treatment of children and adolescents. In this special issue of the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, we have the privilege of presenting a current perspective on psychoanalytic diagnosis in childhood, developed by those who are Anna Freud’s descendants at the Centre named for her in London, formerly known as the Anna Freud Centre. The Centre has recently been renamed The Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families.

Published here for the first time, the 2016 version of the Provisional Diagnostic Profile (Davids et al., 2017) is a substantive revision of the original diagnostic profile first published by Anna Freud within her classic volume Normality and Pathology in Childhood: Assessments of Development (Freud, 1965, pp. 140–147). With some relatively minor changes, the 2016 revision of the profile is based largely on a major 2001 revision that was not previously published (Davids et al., 2001). This special journal issue presents the historical backdrop as well as references contemporary research and newer theoretical integrations which stimulated and supported the substantive changes to the original profile and its application to clinical work. We also present a detailed clinical case (Melandri, 2017) illustrating the application of the profile within the context of an extensive treatment of a young boy with atypical development, and substantive commentary on both the case and the theoretical issues raised by the numerous articles (Altman, 2017; Kalas Reeves, 2017).

The guest editors of this special issue, Inge-Martine Pretorius and Norka Malberg, and all of the article authors (except for Dr. Neil Altman and Dr. Ludwig-Körner) are psychoanalysts who were trained at, and at some point in their career were staff of, the Anna Freud Centr