Workshop on Internal Representations of Parents and Self in Abused and Maltreated Children

This workshop was well attended, and we were quite a crowd in the Nursery: an appropriate venue since some of the pilot work had been done there. For many others besides myself, the setting must have revived memories of bygone Nursery meetings, the more so as I too was presenting work concerned with young children. Some of our discussion - about individual children's material - would have sounded familiar in those meetings. Some would have been much less so; and it was striking that this group of child analysts was at ease with research issues and asked questions about the design of the study, about the comparison group, possible age effects, etc.

I described some preliminary findings from a study based jointly in the Centre and in the Child Care Consultation Team at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, where I also work. This team offers assessment and consultation to Social Service Departments in cases where there has been a breakdown in a family's care of a child and a decision has to be taken regarding the kind of long-term care plan that is in the child's best interests, whether it be, for instance, rehabilitation to parents, permanent substitute family placement, or fostering, with or without contact. As part of the overall assessment, I aimed to devise a relatively rapid but sensitive technique for assessing the individual child. This addresses aspects of the child's mental representations of self, parents, and child-parent relationships, built up on the basis of interactions with the abusing or neglecting parents which continue to shape expectations and perceptions of relationships.

Miriam Steele and I, with assistance from Susan Yabsley, are examining representations of self, parents and relationships in a clinical series of 15 children aged between 4 and 7 who have been abused, neglected or at risk in their families to such a degree that they have been removed into foster care. We are comparing their material with that of a matched group of children who