ABSTRACT
This book grew from discussions between the editors as to the nature of assessment. Paradoxically, it is not a handbook on assessment ± was neither envisaged as such nor bears any pretence of being so. We concluded that assessment both continues throughout any work (it is always therefore `an assessment in progress' even when we call it therapeutic or analytic treatment) and that it is also important to reach a formulation, a working diagnosis that one holds in mind and that has a dynamic life. As Winnicott
wrote: `The essential thing is I do base my work on diagnosis' (Winnicott 1962: 169). We also noted that a request for an assessment invariably involves something additional ± often a follow-up consultation. Yet we frequently speak of these two ± assessment and consultation ± as totally separate tasks. To consider a continuum, therefore, where much of what we undertake as child psychotherapists is located not at either end, in hypothesized `pure' forms of assessing or consulting, but is more central, leaning in either or both polar directions and usually overlapping, seemed useful. And the title, of course, resonates with our Independent and Winnicottian identity.
