Part Two: Introduction

The therapeutic consultations described in this, the second, part will involve the same principles of technique as those in the first part. The reader who is probably doing somewhat similar work will be prepared now for cases in which the issues are more complex. Certainly in some of the cases the background issues have great complexity. Nevertheless in the total working out of a family or social situation there seems to have been a place for the one or perhaps three interviews in which a communication is made with one child. A communication of this kind that I am describing differs from that which is made in the familiar home setting, as between children and parents and among the children themselves. It is also, of course, quite different from the communication that takes place between the child and the teacher at school.

In several of the cases other agencies are at work helping either other children or perhaps the parents themselves, so that the therapeutic consultation as described needs to be thought of as simply one of many things happening in a wider casework issue. It often happens, however, that parents become able to cope with their own problems and the problems of the family when relieved just to the extent that a loosening up in the child's defences follows the therapeutic consultation. In some cases, of course, even where the child makes very good use of the therapeutic consultation, there is no outcome, and this usually means that the problems of the parents or the family were the main issues, the child being caught up in a sick family situation and presenting symptomatology which, although seeming to belong to the child, really does belong to the family. All these are familiar issues in social work involving families.

Once again here in these cases is illustrated not so much a new idea as one example after another of communication with the child, sometimes useful and almost always providing the student or a group of students with material for considerat