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In this paper I want to bring together certain familiar concepts of traditional psychoanalytic theory—concepts such as the repetition compulsion, the function of play in transforming passive experiences into active expression, and the role of transference in the therapeutic process—with some working principles which have informed the efforts of one of the best known British schools for junior school-age maladjusted children, the Mulberry Bush School. The attempt to do so reflects my personal efforts to synthesize my experiences and background as a child psychotherapist with the perspectives and challenges opened up when I took on the post of Therapeutic Adviser to this school in succession to its founder, Mrs. Dockar Drysdale. It should be as a first foray rather than a systematic expedition into territory which, with the exception of a few classics (e.g. Aichorn, 1935; Bettelheim, 1950; Redl, 1951) has been little explored by psychodynamic theorists.
The children we are trying to help at The Mulberry Bush School are those suffering from the lack of what Winnicott has called ‘primary maternal preoccupation’ (Winnicott 1958); that is, from a breakdown of the emotional sustenance from the mothering person on which the psychic health of the infant depends. In other words, we are dealing with children whose original trauma or series of traumas occurred at a time when they were incapable of registering the events which affected them as memories. The fact that these crucial events took place before they could be registered as memories does not mean that they do not have active symbolic expression in the child's behaviour. On the contrary, the fact that the events could not be memorized—we might more properly say conceptualized—is a principal reason why they are likely to be expressed in disguised symbolic form through the child's behaviour. We might even go so far as to say that such children have not reached the stage of limited integration exhibited by Freud's two year o