Introduction

In the last chapter we saw how child guidance came to Britain, concluding with the setting up at the LSE of the Diploma in Mental Health. The latter sought to create a new profession, psychiatric social work. In turn this was part of a broader aspiration on the part of the Commonwealth Fund and the Child Guidance Council to promote a professionalized, even scientific, model of child guidance populated by three distinct professions and led by medicine – the American or medical model. This chapter examines the role of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychiatric social workers in the first decade of British child guidance, having first placed them in their broader intellectual context. The latter included claims to scientific status on behalf of both child guidance as a whole and on the part of each of the three professions. The American/medical model also wished to promote clinical teamwork in child guidance, but teamwork which was hierarchical. This was not, though, uncontested and claims to professional status and professional boundaries were important factors in driving forward, and giving shape to, British child guidance. Psychology, like psychiatry and psychiatric social work, was seeking to establish itself as a scientific and professional discipline and made claims to at least equality with psychiatry in child guidance practice. British child guidance, as was the case with child guidance elsewhere, was disputed territory.