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The ideas and cases presented here are the outcome of our experience in an experimental “Walk-in-Centre” for young people between the ages of 14-22 years†. Our approach, however, was influenced by the insight and understanding acquired from intensive analytic work with adolescents and the detailed discussion and research studies undertaken at the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic.
The staff of the Young People's Consultation Centre—all men and women with a classical psycho-analytic training—worked on the assumption that young people who feel compelled to seek help, must get that help at once and not be kept waiting because of case loads or other administrative considerations. This approach forced upon us the necessity of attempting to distinguish between those of our clients whom we could hope to help in relatively few interviews and those for whom we had to provide more intensive treatment. Thus we were compelled from the outset to examine our cases from the point of view of the depth of pathology.
We found that the largest proportion of our clients came because of emotional disturbances of which they were aware although they did not understand the nature of the underlying conflicts. Others came with a practical problem which masked an emotional one. It was only very rarely that we were asked for genuine practical advice—probably because the average adolescent would get such help from community sources.
We came to realize that our initial interviews could go wrong in various ways:—We might attempt to uncover the underlying conflict too quickly and thereby frighten off our patient, or, more usually, we might tread too carefully and appear to accept the presenting problem as the reason for seeking help. Failure to at least implicitly refer to underlying conflicts might imply that the interviewer would be shocked if he knew about them. In such cases the client feels that he has not been “understood” and thus the communication has failed. This has particular relevance to pro