History of the ACP

In the 1920s Melanie Klein and Anna Freud began to explore how Freud's discoveries with adult patients could be extended to help troubled children and promote their development. Through play the internal world of the child could be understood and difficulties and anxieties addressed. The Child Guidance Movement was also then gaining ground in the UK, although with no specific child training for the professionals doing this work. Only after the Second World War was a 'Provisional Association' of Child Psychotherapists formed. By 1951 the new group had its own training council and rules and dropped the 'provisional' from the title. So a new profession, with its own professional body was established, providing an organisational umbrella for the different training schools. At first these were based mainly in London, but today there are also Child Psychotherapy Trainings in Scotland, the SIHR in Edinburgh, the Northern School of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy in Leeds, and the Birmingham Trust for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Birmingham.