In this article, the author seeks to review the history of The Journal of The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, it's many changes and struggles. Some would maintain that in its early years, the JAACAP was filled with clinically useful case vignettes. But then, their story goes, it took a sharp turn to the left, and now is packed with arcane statistics. Others, conversely, recall those early years as the dark ages of child and adolescent psychiatry, when the Journal was filled with the profession's equivalent of bleeding and purging. Until, it took a sharp right turn and made a commitment to empiricism and the experimental research model. Which are the real facts? The only way to find out is to test those differing views by holding the past 40 years of the Academy Journal up to a mirror. Then readers may be able to see the present in the past, and the past in the present, and perhaps get a better view of where the profession is now, and where it is going. It is by holding 40 years of the Journal up to the mirror that practitioners have seen this journal move from those early guild issues to worldwide leadership in building a knowledge base for the child and adolescent psychiatry field. Though much remains to be explored, the author, concludes that both the academy, and the JAACAP are headed in the right direction.