Review of Margaret Rustin’s Finding a way to the child. Selected papers 1983–2021: Kate Stratton, & Simon Cregeen. (Eds.). (2023). Margaret Rustin’s Finding a way to the child. Selected papers 1983–2021. London and New York:  Routledge.

In this review, I track the evolution of child psychotherapy theory and practice in the United Kingdom as seen through the writings of Margaret Rustin. As British society changed consequently to the dissolution of the British Empire and immigration of people to London, the patient population at the Tavistock clinic, now known as the “Tavistock and Portman National Health Service Trust,” changed. The practice of Child Psychotherapy had to adapt, triggering fundamental changes in psychoanalytic therapy with both children and adults. The nature of this evolution is compared and contrasted with that which occurred in the United States.

Introduction

We GenXers, as psychoanalytic therapists, have lived long enough to witness evolution and change in basics of the field. Sigmund Freud himself kept evolving and changing in his own thinking, so new developments often find a jumping-off point in one of Freud’s lesser-known articles or in one of his footnotes (Dimen, 2023). Child and adolescent psychoanalytic therapists have always had to improvise as their patients never quite fit the standard mold, Think Anna Freud, Klein, and Winnicott. These are prominent examples of child analysts who improvised because they had to, then went on to continue to improvise and innovate with their grown-up patients with a free pass, as it were.

Kleinians are an interesting example, liberals, even radicals in theory, conservatives in practice. Margaret Rustin is a prominent Kleinian; she presided over the crucial years of transition, of challenge and growth in the practice of Child Psychotherapy as head of Child Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic in London from 1985 to 2009. These collected papers give all of us, on both sides of the Atlantic, an inside look at the evolution of her thinking during the years when “the times they were a-changing” (Dylan, 1964).

The British National Health Service and the U. S. Community Mental Health Act

The socio-economic context of psychoanalysis differed