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.
This commentary addresses some technical challenges that can arise in working with children from complex backgrounds. We witness a powerful child with impressive defenses against intimacy, and the paper asks to what extent these defences should be directly challenged or rather be sidestepped. A question is asked about whether the adults in Jason’s life should have been more actively involved in the therapy rather than focusing almost exclusively on individual work. The commentary suggests that this therapist’s sensitive and thoughtful approach gave rise to profound emotional growth, opening up a range of fascinating questions about how to decide on which therapeutic approaches to take with which patients.
This is a very interesting case, one that brings to our attention many typical technical conundrums that we child psychotherapists face with many patients. It also flags some of the differences and similarities of approach that are typically seen across different theoretical perspectives, such as relational, post-Kleinian, or British Independent thinking. We hear from a therapist able to be allow himself to become coopted into the patients internal world, a world that I think is quite bleak and relationship destroying, but we eventually see a movement toward what Winnicott (1971) described as “object usage,” in which the therapist is seen as a genuine other and more real relating has become possible. Here we see a therapist able to bear being immersed in a complex transference and countertransference matrix, which eventually gives way to them being related to as a real, living and breathing human being whose qualities the patient takes in at a fundamental level.
At the start of the presentation I found myself with lots of questions. I wondered why the reader was not given Jason’s history until quite a way into the presentation, and whether this is linked with the common problem of how to talk or even think about adoption. I also pondered the significance of this boy