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This is a book written for professionals working with emotionally disturbed children and their families. For those unfamiliar with psychoanalytic concepts it is an introduction to their usefulness and applications. For those who are familiar with psychoanalytic thinking it provides illustrations of ways in which psychoanalytic ideas can be effectively used in a wide variety of community settings which deal with children and their families, such as hospital departments, community health and family centres and schools. Contributors to the book are drawn from child and adult psychoanalytic psychotherapy, psychiatry, social work, psychology, teaching and other related fields. The book thus reflects the multidisciplinary collaboration it advocates, although it is also evident that the contributors have a shared grounding in psychoanalytic thought and practice. The individual chapters are, in a sense, personal testimony to their writers' innovative work in settings that were often not geared to sensitive response to troubled young minds.
The editors place these innovative projects in the broad socio-political framework of society today: social and economic trends, legislation, and the changes in service provision as a result of the introduction of the concept of an internal market in health, education and welfare. In describing the ‘external world’ of many children subject to poverty and deprivation, the authors emphasize the links between social and economic factors and child mental health. In particular, conditions of external adversity can lead to psychological damage in the child who is deprived of the emotional containment