ABSTRACT
Parents’ and carers’ feelings about their child’s difficulties, their child’s psychotherapist, and the clinic team as a whole are a hugely important part of the picture. A. Sutton and Carol Hughes have coined the term “psychotherapy of parenthood” for psychoanalytic parent work, to denote its status and importance and its focus on the parenting function. The parents may be enabled to relinquish some existing set notions of their relationship with their child, “dream” anew about their child, and conceive fresh thoughts about him or her. The parent worker will allow the clinical material to unfold with an even attention paid to all aspects of the parents’ communication, including non-verbal, unspoken communication, and the experience in the countertransference. The Short-Term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy parent worker is often likely also to be the clinician responsible for the case management of the young person.
