Notes on Contributors

Aysha Begum is a principal clinical psychologist and systemic therapist working in the National Health Service with children/young people, parents/couples, and families. She brings twenty years’ clinical, teaching, and academic experience to her current role as Psychology Lead in a large inner-city Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service. Her academic specialty is in psychiatric epidemiology and her clinical interests are in motherhood, fatherhood, and parental mental health. She is also a UKCP-registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a Bowlby Centre member with a private practice. She is the editor-in-chief of Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis. Email: aysha.begum3@outlook.com

Andrew Briggs trained at the Tavistock and Portman during the early 1990s. He retired in 2018 after a thirty-year career as a child psychotherapist in which he set up Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS)—specialist services for military families, children in care or adopted, and young people who had been members of inner-city gangs. During this time he also taught on masters courses on mental health and psychoanalysis at the Universities of Essex and Kent. Throughout his career he always approached clinical work, consultation, supervision, and multidisciplinary and multi-agency meetings from the position of finding ways to join together different ideas and parameters of thinking, in order to arrive at discipline and professional integration around children and families in crisis. Since retiring he has continued supervising child psychotherapists, and consults to several NHS Trusts on issues related to staff morale. He also runs webinars on the climate crisis and democracy. His published works include peer-reviewed papers on clinical matters and meta issues, and the edited books: Surviving Space: Papers on Infant Observation , Waiting to be Found: Papers on Children in Care , and Towards Belonging . He is currently completing a book