ABSTRACT
In this chapter Cavagnis and Krause explore the opportunities which therapeutic work with children offers. Conventional work with children, such as for example working with attachment theory, tends to reproduce normative expectations derived from Western notions of the family and family relationships and tends to close down the possibility that children communicate other wider relationships and concerns including those derived from wider political and ecological contexts. Cavagnis and Krause consider “reality” as an effect, as an emergence of relationships and practices, and they use cross-cultural examples of attachment to develop this point. They draw on a theory of multiplicity in relationships, of partial connections, of a reciprocal lace and an appreciation of “what lies behind”. Subjectivation is thus seen as an active process of differentiation and folding, drawing on Foucault’s concept of “the fold”. The authors propose a critique of genograms and offer instead the notion of cartography, pointing to unexpected gestures and stopping points, inspired by the work of Deligny.
