As a specialty within a specialty, child psychiatry has now a well-established place in psychological medicine. Yet differences commonly exist between the practice of child and adult psychiatry which seem greater than can be attributed solely to differences inherent in their respective subject matter. A particular instance is the general emphasis in child psychiatry on individual diagnosis, with little attempt at categorization as compared with adult psychiatry. However, Cameron (1955) has drawn attention to the limitation of the growth of knowledge imposed by a lack of clear description and some classification of the manifestations of disturbance in the child. He considers it essential to focus attention on the manifest clinical picture. Again, Kanner (1957) in his diagnostic formulations, attempts in a few words to describe the main features of the clinical picture as well as the factors considered to be of aetiological importance in the individual case. There remains however, the difficulty of attempting to classify the presenting symptomatology, though some success in identifying patterns of maladjustment has been obtained by statistical methods (Hewitt and Jenkins, 1946; Lorr and Jenkins, 1953; Collins, Maxwell and Cameron, 1962).