ABSTRACT
Families come into psychological treatment in many different ways. Sometimes a parent will call requesting family work, but often it is a symptomatic child that provides the impetus for the family to get help. Typically, interviews are scheduled with the parents, with the child named by the parents as the “identified patient”, and with the whole family as part of an initial consultation. At the end of these assessment sessions a treatment recommendation is made, which may be for individual child work with accompanying parent consultation sessions, individual child work with periodic or regular adjunctive family work, or family therapy (Scharff & Scharff, 2005; Wanlass & Scharff, 2016). The family in the case described below, which focuses on interpretative work with unresolved loss, illustrates developmental differences in how children mourn and common challenges in working with grieving families (Bowlby, 1960; Freud, 1917; Garber, 2008; Green, 2013; Nagera, 1970; Sussillo, 2005).
