ABSTRACT
The Winnicottian child, allowed an experience of “good-enough” in-tune mothering, is in a position to meet the world with confident curiosity. As a profession with different theoretical emphases in our trainings, we would hope equally as child psychotherapists to be able to greet each other with a similar curiosity—grounded in our own experience but engaging with the “other” with interest. In this area of work—with the adolescent who is on the cusp of a perverse or delinquent solution that may harden into character disorder—we need to be able to share ideas, think flexibly about what makes sense theoretically and what works clinically, and find an arena for sharing the burden of managing especially difficult counter-transferences (Winnicott, 1947; Lloyd-Owen, 1997; Wilson, 1999). Parsons and Dermen (1999), writing about the violent child and adolescent, describe this burden well:
From the therapist’s point of view, she has to deal with the impact of the child’s very primitive anxieties which will inevitably trigger her own. In practice, the twin dangers are that she may either defend against her own anxieties by denying that she is with a patient who 138could well attack her, or be so afraid of this possibility that she cannot be receptive to the patient’s needs . .. The patient will find it intolerable to be at the receiving end of the very defences upon which he relies ... Additionally, the therapist will have to contend with the arousal of her sadism when attacked. She may respond to this by wishing to control or get rid of the patient. Since the work proceeds slowly and acting out is inevitable, she will also have to deal with feeling useless, helpless and guilty.
[Parsons & Dermen, 1999, p. 344] We may argue as to whether to interpret anxiety at once or not. When we do not do so, it is for the very good reason that interpreting such primitive anxiety too early in the analytic process may be counterproductive and simply strengthen maladaptive and perverse defences—a technical issue often elaborated by Anna Freud in her writings (A. Freud, 1936, pp. 36–37; 1968, p. 143). Indeed, in sustaining traditional and often fundamentalist theoretical positions, rather than engaging with curiosity with each other, we can attack each other with theoretical and technical difference, not recognizing in our rigidity and our activity that we actually mirror the defences of the challenging adolescent.