ABSTRACT
Consider the following clinical situation. A severely deprived 8-year-old girl, whose
plight had been repeatedly unseen and unheard by the authorities, was eventually
fostered, but with poor case management leaving her vulnerable to further abuse. Several
foster homes later she was placed with a foster family who were able to make a
commitment to her and who fought for her to have therapy. In one of her sessions she
spent a great deal of time and effort repeatedly trying to build a tent using a blanket and
parts of the furniture in the room, in ways that would obviously fail. She couldn’t
accomplish this task on her own for straightforward mechanical reasons and yet she kept
trying to achieve the impossible. She kept on and on trying to build a space that she could
physically get inside, in a heartbreakingly futile way, and several times asked the
therapist to help, but in a controlling and rather bullying manner which the therapist felt
he could not agree to. Finally in desperation the child shouted at the therapist who had
quietly observed these efforts, ‘Why won’t you help me?’
