You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As previous clinical commentators have noted, it is a privilege to be able to read and think about a colleague’s work. In this context, without the benefits or protections (for both parties) afforded by a live conversation, making comments carries a particular duty of care.
Following the brief but regrettably familiar family history, I wondered whether Eve was separated from her siblings when in foster care due to sibling conflict and, if so, how the aggression was understood by the adults, and how the move was experienced and understood by Eve? Her initial indiscriminate and unfocussed behaviour in school made me think about Eve’s apparent lack of an available maternal object to provide not only individual nurture and containment, but also a gathering, organising and modulating capacity, perhaps akin to the paternal function of a nipple. This is, I think, also observable in the clinical work described. In the school group, Eve seems to have become quickly lost, overwhelmed, and perhaps frightened. Perhaps she was driven to a frantic searching for her lost sibling group, trying to locate them and herself with them, externally in the school group, and internally in her rather disorganised mind.
Notwithstanding the benefit of the assessing therapist’s experience with Eve, and the foreknowledge that this would be a complex girl to see individually, it is clear that the current child psychotherapist would require fortitude, creativity, and a good capacity to tolerant uncertainty. Eve’s frequent excursions out of the therapy room, walking away from what is on offer with the therapist, and the dropping of him/her in favour of another, expose the therapist to repeated experiences of being turned away from, and potentially shamed, in the public arena of the clinic. This could be thought about as arising in the realm of the transference. The therapist is clearly very committed and feels affection for Eve. It is also inevitable that a therapist in this position would, at times,