ABSTRACT
This chapter was written by Robin Solomon, an independent consultant and senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Solomon also provides consultation to the specialist adoption project, AdCAMHS, which was cofounded by Alison Roy, the author of A For Adoption. Solomon writes that it is not surprising that despite policies mandating that agencies and professionals “work together”, stressful working conditions and lack of resources can arouse “inter-agency anxiety and compartmentalized, disparate, and disconnected organizations and/or inter-professional conflict”. The author uses psychoanalytic concepts to explain relational processes within the organizational settings and the importance of acknowledging understandable defences—for example, when practitioners or managers cannot acknowledge how depleted and potentially “unsafe” their service has become, due to lack of commissioned resources, because they know they need to accept the little they have, rather than risk losing it all. This “hidden” deprivation or denial can be very difficult to challenge in a culture where the majority seem to be accepting of it or offer little resistance.
