ABSTRACT
Many of these severely disturbed children present particular problems of technique and management in the course of psychotherapy. All the children, at times, some in more subtle ways than others, made their therapists feel useless, helpless, rejected, abandoned, messed up or cruelly treated – precisely the experiences and feelings which the patients themselves found intolerable or hard to bear. Such aggressive and violent behaviour in therapy could be considered partly as revenge for rejection and abandonment, but it often also needed to be understood as the aggression of which the patient felt the recipient, rather than the perpetrator. In spite of initial difficulties in getting psychotherapy established, very few of the children actually broke off prematurely. Most became engaged in the work and the enactment of desertion took place within therapy, often freeing the patients to react in a more positive and less rejecting way to houseparents or foster-parents.
