Child psychiatry is the child of various parents: psychiatry and neurology, paediatrics and (curative) education, psychoanalysis and psychology are no less to be found in its family tree than social sciences and anthropology. A particularly important role played the separation from the big sister, adult psychiatry. This process corresponded to an actual collective subjectification – a process that we encounter every day in our clinical and therapeutic work in its individual form. In this article, some stages of this history are reported.