ABSTRACT
Focused on a detailed analysis of a corpus of charity appeal texts, this chapter explores the positions made available for their readers and, in particular, deals with their more and less comfortable features. The chapter has an explicit address to psychotherapists, who after all (as professional carers who treat the relationships they form as the medium for change) have a responsibility to understand the dynamics of imaginary relationships surrounding children, and of the desire to help. But the relevance of the arguments made applies much more generally as well. Images of children-whether happy or distressedabound in Northern popular media. However, as Chapter 5 elaborated, this implies less a concern for children than with other qualities associated with children, because of how the image of the child has come to personify adult inner selves. This dynamic of identification structures the commodification of children, in the sense that such associations are mobilised for the marketing of other products and issues. But perhaps a less obvious consequence is that it also gives rise to the abstraction of the child or children, since they always represent more than themselves.
