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It is with great pride, excitement, anticipation, and humility that I, as founding editor, in joint effort with the executive board, launch our Journal in this millennium year.
The brainchild of developing a new, psychodynamically based child journal seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, when the psychodynamic perspective itself is under such vicious attack from so many different quarters. This is compounded by the fact that most practitioners are under pressure from third-party regulators to focus only on target-symptom reduction. These and other antagonistic forces have the effect of fomenting suspicion about the therapeutic utility of psychodynamically based treatments, as well as casting a persecuting shadow on those who continue to practice it. We have undertaken a labor of three years to bring this Journal into being because of our steadfast belief that the psychoanalytically informed orientation is of significant value to practicing clinicians and their patients.
Since the first child psychoanalyst, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, published her initial clinical paper in 1912 (Maclean and Rappen 1991), child psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy of the child have developed as a subspecialty of psychoanalysis, requiring their own separate training standards. Currently, however, there is a critical lack of psychodynamically informed child therapy journals (Seligman 1997). The primary mission of the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy is to fill this void.
JICAP was conceived and designed with several objectives in mind. The first was to develop a psychodynamically based forum for the exploration and cross-fertilization of clinical theory and practice. Through this study (examination?) of divergent views, the Journal would serve as a means of enhancing the clinical practice of infant, child, and adolescent psychotherapy. To accomplish this task, we took note of Mitchell’s (1991) characterization of our present communication