Keeping Multiple Families in Mind

1. Keeping Multiple Families in Mind Dr Leslie Ironside Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist lironside@emotionaldevelopment.co.uk

2. The greatest need of a child is to obtain conclusive assurance (a) that he is genuinely loved as a person by his parents, and (b) that his parents genuinely accept his love… frustration of this desire to be loved as a person and to have his love accepted is the greatest trauma that a child can experience. Fairbairn D. 1952

3. Complexity of Contact in Today’s Society – The Internet and Globalisation …accelerated pace of modernity pushes all societies and their citizens towards intensified forms of innovation and adaptation. All of us are forced into a world of increasing social complexity in which the stable anchors of tradition are loosened. The taken for granted loyalties of the past become challenged and with it the challenge of finding satisfactory values which can act as a guide in private and public life becomes ever more daunting. Hoggett P - to be published

4. Dilemmatic Space ( Williams B 1973,1981) • No obvious right thing to do • Conflicting pulls, well on the one hand but then on the other • Must do .. But residual not thing we should be doing • Endeavour to ‘act for the best’. Williams B 1973 • Anxiety – take action and left feeling may not have been right • Management of risk and possibility of failure • Experience feelings of doubt, regret and guilt

5. Sustaining the capacity for ethical agency That element of tragedy which lies in the fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. George Elliot

6. Government Health Warning • Contain and manage – resilience, personal and professional agency • Two main forms of demoralisation • Blame Self - Internalise sense of failure - become depressed and despairing, feel bad • Blame others - Project those feelings - onto those seen as responsible - birth parents, foster parents, social worker, judge, teachers etc - feeling failed by others in system.

7. Two Contrasting ways of apprehending the world • differ in the degree of complexity they can hold. • The `paranoid schizoid’ position - reality is dealt with by splitting, fragmenting, compartmentalising and other means of simplification each of which requires a separating out of good and bad, virtue and vice, purity and contamination, and so on. • the `depressive position’ in which, there is the possibility that things may be more `mixed up’ (including one’s own feelings and motives) and this can be entertained. The word `depressive’ is used not because the person in this state of mind is depressed but as a way of acknowledging the sadness and remorse which tends to accompany recognition of the complexity of life and of one’s own and others’ failings.

8. Instead of an idealisation of one’s self and one’s group there is a more realistic appreciation of the bad within the good (that is my/our faults, weaknesses, limitations, etc) and instead of a denigration of the other there is a more generous appreciation of the good within the bad (including the strengths of other value systems to our own). • There is the ability to take the position of the other, including the other who stands as opponent or antagonist to self. • But the ability to take the position of the other, to surrender to competing claims, can be paralysing. It can lead to inaction and indecision, to an agonised impotence. • How do you combine openness to experience with the capacity for decisive action – maintain a sense of authority? • The question remains, what additional internal resources are required to steer a course in the ambiguous, contested and uncertain terrain of dilemmatic space? • And how do we enable the children and young people develop such an internal resource?

9. What is needed for effective agency • psychological capacity to stay in depressive position, to face moral complexity • sense of inner authority or be reduced to agonised indecisions • set of values, not held in idealised way which can provide orientation in dilemmatic space.

10. Infant Development • Gradual integration and organisation • Good, trustworthy /bad unreliable primary carer • Differentiation, integration and paranoid thinking • Interfered with if care is not good enough and infantile anxieties are not modified • Mourning and loss