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It is easy to criticize parent work, just as it is extremely easy to criticize parents and parenting. It is all the more easy to criticize work with parents when there are so many versions of it and its primary task. The work is, in reality, extremely difficult, not least because it is not usually the direct psychotherapeutic encounter, which is the basis of
most of our training. In most of our therapeutic work, we think about and use the transference, more or less directly, depending on our theoretical orientation.
In this case, the work described is still in an exploratory phase, to be reviewed after 6 months of fortnightly work with mother (and sometimes father). These sessions alternate with fortnightly sessions when Steven comes with his mother. Decisions about organizing individual treatment for him are delayed by uncertainty about whether it will be beneficial, despite the fact that he has engaged well in individual assessment sessions. At this point, his mother's needs in relation to managing him and his behaviour seem paramount. There is also a fear that the parents might not engage in long-term parent work and would then stop bringing Steven. There are evident differences between mother and father in relation to the ‘mixed and unclear diagnostic picture’, and, even in the session described in detail, mother oscillates between a position that is in sharp contrast to father, and one in which ‘we’ are united, at least in rejecting the diagnosis of an autistic spectrum disorder.
Whatever the diagnosis might be, and there are several on offer, Steven is a boy who has been the source of great anxiety. There seems to have been a threat, at least in mother's mind, that he would react strongly to weaning; he certainly seems to have had difficulties in being able to sleep on his own at night, from 2 years old. The most obvious difficulty at that time, however, from the parents' point of view, was that his language was regressing. Additionally he could not accept ‘no