ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the experience of participating in that workshop, which came to be seen as a model useful in supporting clinical research. One of the clinical challenges that child psychotherapists have faced is to find ways to work with the increasingly disturbed children now referred for psychotherapy. The research group defined in this way has specific functions that enable the research task to be pursued effectively. The most crucial is the support the group provides for the idea that observations that are as yet unrelated have a potential for being meaningfully linked and patterned. The workshop seemed a source of strength and comfort to its struggling members, helping them to avoid ways of protecting themselves from the impact that these children made on them that might reduce their upset and distress, but at the cost of making the therapy ineffective in the most difficult areas.
