It is the parent who brings their child to us, not the child who comes asking for help—and this could complicate matters!
OUR OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT can be misused to support a view of the child as passive recipient of parental input. This might lead one to have no appreciation of the complicated active processes within the child. Appreciation of the child’s role in assigning meaning to perceptions in the light of developmentally determined capacities and drive propensities, is essential to a reasonable stance with parents who come to us with their concerns.
A misrepresentation of the classic analytic model can be used to distance the analysts from parents who make them anxious. It is easy to see parents as pathogenic, intrusive, disruptive, and unempathic with “the child’s needs”—the analyst may ask why can’t parents just let their child have the experiences or treatment that he/she needs and leave us alone? It is not easy for analysts to see the treatment process, itself, as an intrusion into the family and recognize their own aloofness, unavailability, criticism, exasperation, and even discourtesy as a problem. It is hard to examine the disinclination to understand the parental resistances and work with …
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