Holding the Time: Whither the Meaning of Climate Breakdown for Child Psychotherapists?

This paper proposes that the heritage derived from the ‘analytic hour’ offers a ‘technology’ which has a central place in thinking about the role of the psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapist in relation to the climate and ecological emergency. It draws on associated disciplinary perspectives to consider the nature of ‘time’ in the climate of organisational working life, particularly as it has evolved within our public sector, and how the difficulty of working as a child psychotherapist in this context stems from some of the same roots as the climate crisis. In so doing, the paper explores the political economy in which this work is situated, namely the rise of neoliberalism, and seeks to make explicit the fundamental conflict between its founding assumptions with regard to human nature and those of psychoanalysis. Whilst suggesting that such ontological dissonance is at the heart of a climate breakdown experienced within the public work setting, it is proposed that psychoanalytic child psychotherapy is potentially a discipline for our times: with its realist theoretical foundation in tune with limits revealed in nature, it seeks to preserve a framework of time in which layers of depth might be apprehended with relational understandings at its core. It is thus in the technology of ‘holding the time’ that child psychotherapists can make a unique contribution to the rising generation, for whom we hold moral responsibilities as ancestors in the face of climate breakdown.