There is an increasingly evident and urgent need for child psychiatrists to scrutinize, to clarify and to communicate the nature of the task in which they are professionally engaged. This point is cogently made for the whole of psychiatry in a leading article in The Lancet entitled ‘Psychiatric Training in a Fog’. In it the author draws attention to the grave import for psychiatry of the implications of a number of recent studies. Gross deficiencies in many training programmes with respect to community work and psychotherapy have been shown by the report of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association Manpower and Education Project, by Peter Brook. Disquieting trends in the recruitment of trainees have been reported by Russell. Shepherd has emphasized the need for research in order to back up with established knowledge the expanding aims of contemporary psychiatry. All these studies, it is concluded, point to a need for a ‘fundamental assessment of the whole nature of what constitutes the practice of psychiatry’.