MINDinMIND

How can you get the best out of therapeutic practice with children online? What happens to the therapeutic relationship when it is mediated by technology? How can our work be as effective as possible despite the challenges? And are there even some benefits to online working such as therapy by email or even text which adolescents might prefer? And how about taking patients for a walk in the woods? Carolyn Hart, Child Psychotherapist gives some innovative therapeutic approaches for helping children and adolescents at this challenging time in an interview with Jane O'Rourke.

Case examples have been anonymised.

See Carolyn Hart's 10 minute read on this subject on our website https://www.mindinmind.org.uk/thought-pieces/

Carolyn Hart is a Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist who works both in a specialist Child Adolescent and Mental Health team for looked after children in Sheffield and also in private practice. She has a particular interest in integrating findings from biology and neuroscience into her work. In 2016 she completed a postgraduate diploma concerned with remote ways of working and has been using various technologies since.

How can you get the best out of therapeutic practice with children online? What happens to the therapeutic relationship when it is mediated by technology? How can our work be as effective as possible despite the challenges? And are there even some benefits to online working such as therapy by email or even text which adolescents might prefer? And how about taking patients for a walk in the woods? Carolyn Hart, Child Psychotherapist gives some innovative therapeutic approaches for helping children and adolescents at this challenging time in an interview with Jane O'Rourke.  

Case examples have been anonymised.  

See Carolyn Hart's written Thought Piece on this subject on our website https://www.mindinmind.org.uk/thought-pieces/

Carolyn Hart is a Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist who works both in a specialist Child Adolescent and Mental Health team for looked after children in Sheffield and also in private practice. She has a particular interest in integrating findings from biology and neuroscience into her work. In 2016 she completed a postgraduate diploma concerned with remote ways of working and has been using various technologies since.

How to reconcile adult hypocrisy and bullying whilst preaching kindness to children?  

In this insightful  interview with Jane O'Rourke, Neil Altman argues that for the most part, we adults fail to help children come to terms with what they observe, because we ourselves don’t know how to integrate our own potential for violence and aggression with our kind and loving feelings.

Go to our website for Neil's written blog about this:

https://www.mindinmind.org.uk/thought-pieces/how-to-educate-young-children-about-bullying/

MINDinMIND INTERVIEW www.mindinmind.org.uk

Juliet Hopkins has had a significant impact on child psychotherapy.  As the niece of John Bowlby, she robustly defends his place in the field of psychoanalysis, shares her concept of ‘Too Good Mothering’ and how she has integrated attachment theory and research on intergenerational trauma. She recalls how Enid Balint lifted her from depression and how penis envy and hearing about penis envy was a completely normal part of everyday life!

Juliet Hopkins was a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic and the London Child Guidance Training Centre from 1960-2000 and has had a significant impact on child psychotherapy.  As the niece of John Bowlby, it is perhaps no surprise that she has been a keen advocate of attachment theory, but she has been credited with doing much in her own right to develop child psychoanalytic theory by integrating attachment theory and research on intergenerational trauma and its impact on infant mental health.

Interview by Jane O'Rourke

KEY HIGHLIGHTS:

·  Juliet shares her regret about feeling embarrassed about her uncle being John Bowlby when she was a trainee, and the painful rejection of him by colleagues at the Tavistock Clinic who considered his ideas ‘ridiculous’. She says despite his theories being widely embraced by child clinicians throughout the world, he is still not properly honoured at the Tavistock or by psychoanalytic organisations.

·  How her analyst Enid Balint lifted her from depression

·  Juliet’s recall of a time in history is fascinating. It was when some children like her grew up with parents who were steeped in psychoanalysis (her mother's analyst was Joan Riviere) 

·  Juliet's difficulties with her own parents and children inspired her to develop important ideas about parenting in psychotherapy and led to the illuminating theory of ‘Too Good Mothering,’ which she shares here

Her colleague Dilys Daws says, ‘Juliet has widened our view of what child psychotherapy can encompass and shows that diametrically differing approaches can co-exist and nourish each other’.

Another colleague, Ann Horne, says ‘Juliet has for over 50 years quietly questioned theory, subjected it to scrutiny and declared where it is found wanting, in the manner of her main influences John Bowlby and DW Winnicott.  An advocate of the importance of environment and family, she challenged practice that focussed exclusively on the internal world of the child and importantly championed her uncle John Bowlby's work on attachment. Always aware of the power of psychoanalytic insights, she has used these to inform change in the care and understanding of children, from medical students in Hong Kong in the late 60’s to establishing the original course in Infant Mental Health at the Tavistock and founding with colleagues the UK branch of Association of Infant Mental Health.  That she communicates with intelligence, elegance and clarity has been vital in all of this.  More people should read and listen to her: I am so glad that MindinMind has enabled it’.

Juliet also undertook family therapy training as well as training in child and adult psychoanalytic psychotherapy. She was a founder member of the independent child psychotherapy training run by the British Association of Psychotherapists.  She has retired from private practice as a psychotherapist for adults and children but remains an Honoured Member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists.

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On Oct 1st 2020 to officially launch MINDinMIND, Jane O’Rourke gathered a group of clinicians, who between them have had an enormous influence on child psychotherapy and the children and families they have dedicated their lives to helping.

The driving force of MINDinMIND has been to capture the voices of the founding greats of child psychotherapy and you can hear many of them gathered here in discussion about what best helps deprived and traumatised children.

·  Highlights include GIANNA WILLIAMS, a Consultant Child Psychotherapist and Psychoanalyst and  one of the most respected and incisive clinicians in child mental health today, who has developed ideas such as Double Deprivation which have become central to our understanding deprived children

·  RICKY EMANUEL joined her to discuss how organisations supposed to be helping deprived children can actually further deprive them, leading to Triple Deprivation, a concept developed by his late wife Louise Emanuel

·  GRAHAM MUSIC illuminated our understanding of  trauma with a psychoanalytic and neurobiological lens

·  STEPHEN SELIGMAN talked about the importance of Parent Infant Work and Selma Fraiburg with whom he worked

·  JEANNE MAGAGNA shared with us the magic of teaching child observation to parents

·  Valuable contributions from other child psychotherapist greats- LYDIA TISCHLER, ISCA WITTENBERG & MONICA LANYADO

So sit back and enjoy the wisdom that flows from these luminaries in child psychotherapy about what best helps deprived and traumatised children.

Thanks to everyone who spoke and attended the launch of MINDinMIND– in particular Gianna Williams and Ricky Emanuel. Thanks also to board members Graham Music, Stephen Seligman, Laura Mae Brown and Shivani Lamba for helping make it all possible.

For 50 years child and adolescent psychotherapist, Monica Lanyado, has been focussed on how to best treat traumatised children.  

In this legacy interview you can hear what she believes best helps these children, a motivation which has fuelled much of her working life. As anyone who has worked with traumatised children will know, this work is at times harrowing, despairing and exhausting, making demands on us that at times feel unstainable, and yet she says that when sufficient hope cannot be maintained it is not possible to carry on the work. Jane O’Rourke asked her why….  

For more information see the interview on our website @ www.mindinmind.org.uk  

Monica trained at the Tavistock Clinic under the auspices of Mattie Harris who then ran the child psychotherapy training, alongside other notable names such as Isca Wittenberg, Isobel Menzies- Leith and Frances Tustin. And yet after a training which primarily focussed on the theories of Melanie Klein, she began to forge her own theoretical pathway, drawing on a diverse range of psychoanalytical thinkers. After only 6 yrs following qualification, she set up a new child psychotherapy training at the Scottish Institute of Human Relations. A succession of books and papers focussing on the treatment of traumatised children have flowed over the years, including the invaluable, ‘Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy’ and most recently ‘Transforming Despair to Hope’. Monica is also a supervisor for the child psychotherapy training at the British Psychotherapy Foundation. 

Full list of publications @ www.mindinmind.org.uk and to sign up to our newsletter 

Welcome to the launch interview of MINDinMIND where the world’s leading clinicians working in child mental health share their ideas about what best helps children and families.  This is the first online platform to curate and centralise high-quality interviews of leading practitioners to bring the most important thinking to current and future professionals working with children and families. 

Our debut interview is with one of the most respected and incisive clinicians in child mental health today, Gianna Polacco Williams, who has done much to help our understanding of internal defences and eating disorders in particular. She is a Consultant Child Psychotherapist and Psychoanalyst.  Her paper 'Doubly Deprived' https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00754179708257300?journalCode=rjcp20 (Henry, 1974), written as Gianna Henry, broke new ground. It became an instant classic and is still one of the most quoted papers in child psychotherapy.   The significance of Gianna's contribution can not be over-estimated.  It sparked research into psychotherapy with traumatised children, pioneered at the Tavistock Clinic by Mary Boston and others (Boston and Szur, 1990).  Before it was published there was a widely held belief that severely deprived children could not be helped with psychotherapy.

In this interview she talks about Martin, the 14 years old patient who was the source of her ideas, and why the concepts she wrote about then are as relevant today.

The concept of Double Deprivation suggests that the first deprivation is that which has been caused by a child’s external circumstances which cannot be changed.  The second deprivation is due to a child’s internal defences which have developed in the avoidance of psychic pain and the nature of the child’s internal objects, which with treatment can be modified and so is changeable.

Gianna also discusses in depth one of her other key theoretical ideas, the ‘No Entry’ defence, an illuminating concept in understanding the development of some eating disorders.

Gianna has worked all over the world, including the Tavistock Clinic for over 50 years (2020) where she led the child psychotherapy discipline in the Adolescent Department. She has been instrumental in establishing child psychotherapy trainings in her native country, Italy.

Gianna became a member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists in 1966, and worked at the Child Guidance Training Centre, Tavistock Centre from 1968-70. She has been working at the Tavistock Clinic from 1970 to the present day.

Each week we are adding more interviews and research from leading thinkers and innovators sharing what their experience has taught them about children's minds and psychological issues such as anxiety, trauma and depression and how families can cope with these times of extreme challenge. Now more than ever, all of us working with children need the wisest minds to guide us. Everyone featured here have spent their clinical lives honing their understanding of child and family life.

GO TO WWW.mindinmind.org.uk FOR FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY AND WRITTEN OUTLINE OF INTERVIEW

Podcasts, videos & research from leading practitioners in child mental health

MINDinMIND is where the world’s leading clinicians working in child mental health share their ideas about what best helps children and families.

Now more than ever, all of us working with children need the wisest minds to guide us. Everyone featured here have spent their clinical lives honing their understanding of child and family life.

Each week we are adding interviews, blogs and research from leading thinkers and innovators sharing what their experience has taught them about children's minds and how families can cope with these times of extreme challenge.

Though our interviewees are all leaders in their field, many have not been interviewed at length before. 

We look forward to this opportunity to learn from colleagues we admire and respect, to help grow in our practice and better serve the children and families we wish to help.

FOR SHOW NOTES AND MORE INFORMATION GO TO www.mindinmind.org.uk

Editorial Board of MINDinMIND:

Jane O’Rourke - Child, Adolescent and Family Psychotherapist

Graham Music – Consultant Child, Adolescent and Adult Psychotherapist

Stephen Seligman - Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California

Laura-Mae Brown - Wellbeing Practitioner and trainee Psychodynamic Psychotherapist

Shivani Lamba – Software Engineer and Founder of Brightlobe, pioneering software for child health