ABSTRACT
In our society the family is the unit in which it is assumed the child’s development will take place. The imaginative literature as well as an enormous quantity of professional writing testifies to the family being seen as the source of satisfactions and dissatisfactions. Breakdown of the family as a psychic entity may in some households occur without formal disruption. This may lead to noncommunicating members fending for themselves in some less usual cases. A great deal can be done to restore and sustain a ‘family structure’ by combining imaginatively natural and professional elements (such as combinations of foster-care with parents, children’s homes, day care centres, boarding schools and so on) where the original family unit is not viable alone. Many of the children referred are likely to threaten the integrity of their psychotherapy and of their reconstructed family circle with the disruption that their original family suffered.
