ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the key ideas conveyed in Hamish Canham’s papers on Looked After Children (LAC) and discusses developments in the field arising from his clinical and theoretical contributions. It focuses on ways in which psychoanalytic concepts gained through training as a child psychotherapist and applied to therapeutic interventions with individual children can inform the process of consultation to social services teams, their managers, and other services for LAC. The chapter describes some of the primitive defences against mental pain that infants may develop in the absence of an attentive carer to contain their anxieties. Linking this to Canham’s ideas about LAC’s distorted perception of time and relating it to these children’s experiences of coping with separation, transition and loss. The chapter explores how an understanding of early infantile defences against mental pain can inform our consultation work with practitioners, who may employ similar defences to avoid “seeing” unbearable distress in the children they work with.
