Reclaiming Redl's wisdom: current approaches to troubled children focus on external control and superficial compliance. This article explores the significance of Fritz Redl's concept of building controls from within to effective practice in the 21st century.(reclaiming worldwide)

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This special issue has particular meaning for me, having grown up personally and professionally as a devotee of Fritz Redl's ideas and descriptions, which are seminal foundations for successful work with young people--indeed, with people of all ages. For those of us whose careers began in the middle of the 20th Century, citing Redl's thinking was almost reflexive. His deft conceptualizations made learning about the work clear and, at the same time, fun. Fritz's thinking, it seems, would always be with us, lighting and lightening our way toward more effective practice.

With the passing of time, however, Redl's work was no longer well known, a failure of our professional education enterprise to sustain and enhance the best of our conceptual roots. As these foundations have eroded, other ideologies have dominated our professional education programs (see, e.g., VanderVen, 1995). In response to economic and other pressures, techniques that lack adequate conceptual underpinnings have supplanted traditional approaches, often reflecting a kind of herd mentality.

This is not to denigrate the value of creative new approaches and techniques, but rather to suggest that these need to be grounded in proven conceptual foundations, not simply offered as panaceas that we are expected to adopt uncritically. Under pressure to meet growing needs with diminishing resources, we race to embrace new solutions well before the problem has been adequately defined or classical approaches have been adequately explored. Then we are surprised when the new cure-all proves not to be "the answer" after all.

From this perspective, it should be clear why we greeted so enthusiastically the prospect of this special issue focused on "controls from within'--both the concept and its reflection in the work of Redl and his colleagues (e.g., Redl & Wineman, 1952) more than half a century ago. It is a needed corrective to the more recent emphasis on external, often coercive approaches as the methods of choice in serving troubled and troubling youth, hopefully restoring the approaches that Redl represents to their essential place at the center of conceptual thinking and practice wisdom in the field. We hope that many practitioners and students of good, effective practice, as well as senior figures in the field, will read and study Fritz's ideas as reflected in this special issue so that students in this field will not again respond by asking, "Fritz Redl? Who is he?"

Redl: Who Is He and What Did He Do?

Redl was an early, articulate, and influential advocate of developmentally-oriented, strengths-based approaches in working with troubled and troubling young people, and much of his work was focused on residential group care settings. Always an active proponent of normalizing perspectives, Redl and his work drew heavily on organized camping as a potential model for effective practice in residential treatment and education, both early on (e.g., Redl, 1942, 1947) and as a recurrent presence throughout his career (see, e.g., Beker, 1991; Morse, 1991a, 1991b).