Introduction

In the late 1950s the Royal Medico-Psychological Association observed that in child guidance's early days the roles of the psychiatrist and the educational psychologist were clearly distinct and seldom overlapped. As both professions became increasingly concerned with the ‘whole child’, though, so boundaries became blurred. But few educational psychologists had been trained ‘to allow them to be competent in the therapeutic field, or to interview parents about emotional disturbances in their children’. The present shortage of child psychiatrists, however, had encouraged psychologists ‘to take on quite seriously disturbed children’. This, the Association felt, ‘should not be allowed to prejudice the development of a proper child psychiatric service’. Nonetheless it was certainly the case that no ‘one agency can deal with a child in all its aspects’. The field therefore had to be broken up into ‘functional units, of which child psychiatry is one’. Recalling a trend we noted in the last chapter it was then suggested that the term ‘child guidance’ was now becoming ‘outmoded’ and that it was thus ‘more appropriate to speak of the investigation, diagnosis and treatment of disturbances in children’ as ‘child psychiatry’. For the Association, then, child guidance as originally conceived had outgrown itself while some of those purporting to practice it, educational psychologists, were not equipped to do so.