ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the clinical experience in the project, which embraces systemic, psychoanalytic and attachment frameworks. The referrals are made, by social workers and parents, because of concerns about threats to the continuity of placement, anxieties about the suitability of placement and, with increasing frequency, because of the need to resolve questions Family therapy was finding application in work with families in breakdown, where there was a crisis of the reception of a child into care. The development of the Milan Systemic approach provided the means to conceptualise the complex multisystemic interrelationships involved in the social services context about ongoing contact between birth parents and the children. Another important social change over this period has been the move away from the idea of a normative family to the recognition of the great variety of patterns of relationship, family forms and structures that make up our multicultural society.
