The Use of Play Technique in Understanding Disturbed Behaviour in School

This is a condensed account of the way in which a play-therapy setting was applied to rendering more intelligible the disturbed and disturbing behaviour of a 15-year-old boy within his school. This kind of work highlights the importance of harnessing analytic insights into a child's behaviour onto a supportive intervention with those responsible for the day-to-day care of the child. I hope to show how the understanding gained in observing a child can be conveyed to those caring for him, so as to help them in their own understanding of the feelings stirred up in themselves. The main usefulness of this type of work resides in the linking together of these two components, rather than in either separately. That is to say, neither analytic understanding of the child from a limited contact, nor discussion with those in caretaking or parental roles, is sufficient in itself, but rather that the combination needs to be made in the service of containing staff anxieties evoked by the child.

This account then is a contribution to the problem of making psychoanalytic understanding available to others with responsibility for the care of those whose internal worlds we assess but do not have in treatment.