ABSTRACT
In this chapter we describe the nature of psychotherapy at the Mulberry Bush School. The Mulberry Bush School was founded in 1948 by Barbara Dockar-Drysdale, who had a long and close working relationship with Winnicott; they were strongly influenced by each other’s ideas. Originally Dockar-Drysdale worked with evacuee children in the post-World War Two period. By living alongside the children she developed a psychoanalytically informed theoretical model of residential therapeutic treatment. In the 1950s these ideas and her ways of implementing them were pioneering and radical. She utilized categories of emotional disturbance which were based on the developmental stage at which traumatic interruption had taken place. Children exhibiting the most primitive level of disturbance were called ‘frozen children’. Those children with some areas of healthier functioning were described as ‘archipelago children’; she also had various categories of false self. All these categories defined different levels of ‘unintegration’. Her aim was that children became integrated through the treatment offered by the school. Each category had its own discrete conceptual framework and treatment model – she had a very rigorous method of assessing children, perhaps as rigorous as Anna Freud’s Diagnostic Profile (1965).
