ABSTRACT
In our society the family is the unit in which it is assumed the child's development will take place. Our imaginative literature as well as an enormous quantity of professional writing testifies to the family being seen as the source of our satisfactions and dissatisfactions: the origins of our strength and security or the hotbed of our neuroses. The children written about in this book, however, have suffered from a lack or loss of family life and I would like to consider the position of such children and the complications of trying to remedy their situation. I would like to do this not comprehensively but from a particular angle, putting aside consideration of the imperative needs of the child for physical care, love, protection and attention, in order to consider the family as the matrix for the child's development: the ‘locus in quo’ of his personal saga. From this point of view the family, however composed, provides a bounded space for the child which, when broken, needs to be restored or replaced. The family seen from this viewpoint is the receptacle into which the child is born. The ability of the family, like a living cell, to maintain its own membrane, its interface with the world, is crucial to its own survival and the functioning of its components. When family breakdown has occurred the child may or may not be homeless but he is psychically unplaced.
