Children and Young People’s Experience of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Qualitative Meta-Synthesis

The development of evidence-based practice guidelines for psychotherapy is based primarily on the findings from randomised controlled trials, but there is also a need to understand and learn from the experience of those who attend therapy. Some studies have begun to examine the experience of children and adolescents who have been in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. However, no investigations to date have synthesised this body of work and drawn clinical implications from this research. Therefore, this study aimed to provide the first qualitative meta-synthesis of empirical studies examining children and young people’s experiences of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Articles meeting the inclusion criteria (n = 11) addressed treatments taking place in the UK, Scandinavia and Western Europe, and most of them focused on those who were in therapy as adolescents. The overall methodological quality of the studies was high. Based on the qualitative meta-synthesis, four over-arching themes were identified: (1) Children and adolescents learn to navigate their role during therapy; (2) The importance of the therapeutic relationship; (3) Psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a ‘painful’ process; and (4) Perceived impact of psychotherapy varies and is difficult to gauge. Some of the findings were consistent with the literature on adults’ experiences of psychoanalytic therapy, as well as young people’s experiences of other types of therapy. However, the findings also point to certain unique features of psychoanalytic psychotherapy for children and adolescents. The clinical implications of the findings are discussed.