Prologue

THE TAVISTOCK CLINIC, AN EXCITING PLACE, was founded in 1920 and has always had a community mental health purpose. Its child psychotherapy training began just 50 years ago, in 1948, organized by John Bowlby, then Chairman of the Children's Department, and with the inspiration of Esther Bick.

Anna Freud had started the Hampstead Child Therapy Course the previous year in 1947, and both had been preceded by Margaret Lowenfeld who pioneered a small training in 1933. This later became the Institute of Child Psychology, which closed 20 years ago.

The overall professional body, the Association of Child Psychotherapists (ACP), was established in 1949. There are now six training schools answerable to it. As well as the Tavistock Clinic and the Anna Freud Centre, there are ones within the British Association of Psychotherapists and the Society of Analytical Psychologists (Jungian), two trainings more recently set up outside London, the Birmingham Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and one at the Scottish Institute of Human Relations in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Child psychotherapy is flourishing in the UK, mainly within the National Health Service (NHS), itself founded in 1948. The NHS, with free healthcare accessible to all, is one of the great achievements of this country. Mary Boston and I wrote about an earlier stage of development of the profession (Daws and Boston, 1977), and a forthcoming book by Horne and Lanyado (1999) will mark the 50th Anniversary of the ACP.

Child psychotherapists work in Child and Family Consultation Centres in the community; they also work in hospital psychiatric and pediatric departments, in social services, and increasingly with GPs, that is, family doctors. In the Tavistock Clinic, child psychotherapy training and clinical work takes place within the Child and Family and Adolescent Departments alongside colleagues in psychiatry, psychology