Children and Institutions I: The Child and the Professional

This paper attempts to pick out the specifically institutional dimension of the interactions between the children and professional staff of institutions catering for troubled children and adolescents. I use the word “institution” to mean both a physical place (building, rooms, furnishings etc.) and a social system in which people are in formal (and informal) relationships with each other. I concentrate upon the meaning of the institution to the child and the role of the professional who tries to provide conditions in which the child can make sense of his experience.

In addressing the question of what institutions mean to children, I have used theories derived from psychoanalysis and from the study of organisations, and brought them to bear upon the experiences of psychotherapists working in institutions. Although my examples come from the setting of psychotherapy, I am not addressing the subject of specialised treatments which may take place in institutions, but rather the general therapeutic setting of institutional life which may support whatever specialised treatments are available within it. The client group is an important aspect of a child's experience in day and residential units, but it lies outside the scope of this paper.

It is difficult to conceive of a child's experience of an institution except in terms of his relationships with the staff, who bring to the relationship the stamp of the place and the social system in which they work. One could say that the child's experience of the institution is mediated by the staff. On the one hand, the professionals find themselves having to take account of the institution, its organisation, its task and its resources, and the dynamics of small and large groups in the various groupings of staff. On the other hand, they are beset by the problems of the children, their deprivations and traumas which evoke sympathy and the wish to help, and their confusing and exasperating behaviour and rejections, which make