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Work discussion: learning from reflective practice in work with children and families, edited by Margaret Rustin and Jonathan Bradley, London, Karnac, 2008, 309 pp., £19.99
Work discussion, as a topic, has been a Cinderella in the literature of child psychotherapy. This welcome volume, in the Tavistock Clinic Series, starts to fill out a substantial space. Work discussion, along with infant observation and individual and group supervision, is a central feature of child psychotherapy training, together with academic teaching. To date, it has had much less formal consideration than its fellows, although, to a lesser extent, the contribution of child psychotherapy to supervisory practice in training and beyond has also received insufficient attention. Yet as Trudy Klauber remarks in her short foreword to this book: ‘the work discussion model is the epitome of the application of psychoanalytic ideas’.
The concise foreword sticks to task in foreshadowing, in an engaging and interesting way, that which the editors will illustrate most successfully in the various sections of the book. Klauber outlines the psychoanalytic pre-history to the work discussion method, recalling the work of psychoanalytic luminaries such as Bion, Rickman, Balint, Bick, Anna Freud and the Robertsons. The broad applicability of the work discussion method is described, as is its transformative potential for individuals. Certain key concepts such as containment and projection are picked out.
Margaret Rustin, introducing the book, suggests that ‘Studies in Containment’ might have been an alternative title, so centrally did Bion's concept figure in a trawl of student archived work. The impact of Bion's work impresses the reader too, when one appreciates the theoretical underpinning his work on groups provides throughout this account of work discussion. This work on groups became widely disseminated and taught post-war in academic settings and vocational trainings, as did the applied work of other psychoa