This book investigates the experiences of severely troubled children and their families, teachers, and child psychoanalytic psychotherapists working together in primary schools. The book begins by looking at children’s emotional life during the primary school years and what can disrupt ordinary, helpful social development and learning. It examines what child psychoanalytic psychotherapy is, how it works, and why it is offered in primary schools. The following chapters intersperse accounts of creative child psychoanalytic approaches with interviews with parents, carers, teachers, and clinicians. A section focusing on mainstream primary schools presents parent–child interventions for a nursery class; child group psychotherapy with children from traumatized families; and consultation to school staff, with personal accounts from parents, a kinship carer, a family support worker, a deputy head, and a child psychotherapist. Chapters then focus on alternative educational settings, featuring a school for children with severe physical and cognitive disabilities; a primary pupil referral unit; and a therapeutic school. These chapters show psychotherapy with a non-verbal boy with autism; therapy groups with children who have missed out on the building blocks of development alongside reflective groups for school staff; and child psychotherapy approaches at lunchtime and in breaks, with insights from a parent, a clinical lead nurse, a head teacher, and a child psychotherapist. Finally, there is an evaluation of evidence about the impact of child psychotherapy within primary schools. Recognizing the increasing importance of attending to the emotional difficulties of children whose relationships and learning are in jeopardy, this book will be invaluable to all those working in primary schools, to commissioners of child mental health services, to parents and carers, and to experienced and training clinicians.

This book is an indispensable guide to providing therapy services for children and adolescents in primary and secondary school settings. The contributors have extensive experience in the field and carefully examine every aspect of the work, ranging from developing an understanding of the school context in all its complexity, through to what to say and do in challenging therapy sessions and in meetings with school staff or parents and carers. Therapeutic Practice in Schools opens with an overview of key psychoanalytic concepts informing therapy practice. This is followed by a detailed exploration of the hopes and anxieties raised by providing therapy in schools, the factors that either enable or impede the therapist's work and how to manage expectations as well as measure outcomes. The practical aspects of delivering therapy sessions are also covered, from the initial assessment phase through recognising and working with anxieties, defences, transference and counter-transference to working with endings. An awareness of the impact of social identity, gender, race and culture on both the therapist and client is woven into the book and is also discussed in depth in a dedicated chapter. The manual offers a comprehensive yet highly readable guide to the complex world of school-based therapy. It provides practical examples of how therapists translate theory into everyday language that can be understood by their young clients, ensuring that trainees starting a placement in schools, as well as therapists beginning work in the educational setting for the first time, are able to take up their role with confidence.

Short-term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (STPP) is a manualised, time-limited model of psychoanalytic psychotherapy comprising twenty-eight weekly sessions for the adolescent patient and seven sessions for parents or carers, designed so that it can be delivered within a public mental health system, such as Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the UK. It has its origins in psychoanalytic theoretical principles, clinical experience, and empirical research suggesting that psychoanalytic treatment of this duration can be effective for a range of disorders, including depression, in children and young people. The manual explicitly focuses on the treatment of moderate to severe depression, both by detailing the psychoanalytic understanding of depression in young people and through careful consideration of clinical work with this group. It is the first treatment manual to describe psychoanalytic psychotherapy for adolescents with depression.

What do we wish to know about psychotherapy and its effects? What do we already know? And what needs to be accomplished to fill the gap? These questions and more are explored in this thoroughly updated book about the current status and future directions of psychotherapy for children and adolescents. It retains a balance between practical concerns and research, reflecting many of the new approaches to children that have appeared in the past ten years. Designed to change the direction of current work, this book outlines a blueprint or model to guide future research and elaborates the ways in which therapy needs to be studied. By focusing on clinical practice and what can be changed, it offers suggestions for improvement of patient care and advises how clinical work can contribute directly and in new ways to the accumulation of knowledge. Although it discusses in detail present psychotherapy research, this book is squarely aimed at progress in the future, making it ideal for psychologists, psychiatrists, and all mental health care practitioners.

Drawing on the rich range and depth of the clinical experience of the contributors, this welcome volume will be a valuable tool for clinicians and trainees. The authors share a powerful commitment to the relevance and value of psychoanalytically based work with parents - an area all too often inadequately provided for - and provide heartening evidence of the resilience and intellectual vitality of the various strands within this tradition. Part of the EFPP Monograph Series.

Exploring the work of a Psych-Oncology Team in an inpatient and outpatient setting, this powerful, interesting, and engaging book is about teenagers and young adults diagnosed with cancer. As part of the few multidisciplinary teams of this type in the United Kingdom, the authors offer helpful insights into supporting young people and their families as they navigate this complex and devastating disease, writing on key areas such as trauma, the effects of early childhood cancer in adolescence and beyond, the social and cultural effects of cancer treatment, hope, and hopelessness, and questions of mortality. Each chapter contains a mixture of clinical reflections and patient vignettes, along with clear guidance about how to support patients and their families both during and after treatment, and at the point of death too. With a compassionate approach to understanding the challenges for patients, their families, and clinicians alike, this is a book for nurses, doctors, occupational therapists, and physiotherapists, for parents and carers, and for young people who find themselves in this position and who can easily feel as though they are alone with their overwhelming feelings.

As individuals engaged with children and those around them, educational psychologists enter a multitude of systems and relationships with the intention of helping. This often involves working in a context of confusion, conflict and creativity, a dynamic tension which is reflected in the chapters of this book. Designed to give both students and practitioners access to the experience of engaging with a dynamic unconscious, this volume investigates some of the key tenets and principles of psychoanalytic theory and demonstrates ways in which educational psychologists have used both theory and practice in their roles. Each chapter approaches a recognisable activity from educational psychology practice and provides an account of how psychoanalytic theories about our unique inner worlds and our unconscious processes can inform and enrich these interactions.

By bringing together perspectives from psychoanalysis and literary studies and considering the reciprocal relation between ideas about mourning and our internal worlds, this book provides a guide to thinking theoretically about loss and how we deal with it. Rael Meyerowitz conceptualizes the work of psychic internalization required by loss in terms of bodily digestion and metabolization. In this way, successful mourning can be likened to the proper processing of physical sustenance, while failed mourning is akin to indigestion, as expressed in various forms of melancholia, mania, depression, and anxiety. Borrowing from the methodology of literary criticism, the book conducts a detailed treatment of these themes by drawing on a series of psychoanalytic works, including those of Freud, Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Klein, Loewald, Torok, Nicolas Abraham, and Green, while paying close critical attention to a selection of literary works such as those by William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath. Aimed at clinicians as well as readers with a more academic interest in psychoanalytic theory and language, the close-reading format offered by this book will also enable students in psychoanalytic and psychotherapy courses to engage deeply with some central texts and key concepts in psychoanalysis.

Parent-Child Art Psychotherapy presents a working model of ways to incorporate parents into a child’s art therapy sessions, drawing on the relational-psychoanalytic notion of mentalization in the treatment of difficulties within childhood relationships. The model is introduced by clearly explaining the theory, the setting, the role of the therapist, and the work with the parents. In addition, the book offers a full section dedicated to practical applications of the model, replete with illustrative case studies and detailed therapeutic art-based interventions covering leadership, movement, collaborative and solitary work, and parent-child exercises. Intended for art therapists, students, parent-child psychotherapists, and other therapists interested in expanding their knowledge in the field, Regev and Snir provide a definition and conceptualization of a short-term treatment model with the potential to have comprehensive effects leading to positive change.

Introducing key psychodynamic theory, concepts and techniques, this text examines the challenges and opportunities of counselling adolescents and children. The book explores a wide variety of settings and contexts, from schools to community projects and mental health services. It is an invaluable guide for counsellors and therapists at all levels.