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When the Tavistock child psychotherapy training was started in 1948 by John Bowlby and Esther Bick, its focus was on individual psychotherapy with children, often supported by a psychiatric social worker who worked with the parents. This important book of papers by Margaret Rustin, a leading child psychotherapist, charts the widened range of child psychotherapy over the past 60 or more years. Work with individual children and adolescents continues to be the core of the training. But in addition to this core, child psychotherapists are involved in work with families, schools and institutions, and with the parents of the referred child. This extension of scope to other modalities of treatment has been matched by a widening in the nature of the problems now treated by child psychotherapists. From the 1960s, as Rustin explains, some courageous child psychotherapists at the Tavistock offered psychotherapy to children who had experienced severe trauma. Many had been abused and had had repeated broken foster placements or failed adoptions. Others, adopted from abroad, had traumatic conflicts about their identity.
This broader range of work is now routine for child psychotherapists, but this might easily not have happened. The fact that it has, both at the Tavistock and elsewhere, is to a considerable degree due to Margaret Rustin. She has been centrally involved in the development of child psychotherapy in the UK over the last 50 years. She trained at the Tavistock Clinic in the early days of the training there and worked and taught there after that, becoming head of the child psychotherapy discipline in 1986. She was instrumental in developing training schools in the Midlands and in the North of England. Working in the public sector, in, as she emphasises in one of her papers, the national health service has been very important to her, as has been her wish to reach as wide a patient population as possible. Because of her vision of an equitable service, and because of her t