Quote of the Day

When we allow the splitting to take place, as we do this when we say “Speak to your therapist about it on Monday,” we miss the opportunity of “being and staying” with the child. We also miss the opportunity to resolve the transference and counter-transference distortions. Weiner quotes Havens who said: “the counter-transference is not resolved in the private world of the therapist’s thoughts, but, as with the resolution of the transference, in the encounters of person to person” (Weiner, 2002).

The concept of “being and staying” is identified by Weiner as the core of the existential approach to residential treatment. He suggests that it is a useful way to deal with the child’s day-to-day experiences. He describes “being and staying” as: “to join the patient where he is, to feel what he feels, to be with the patient” (Weiner, 2002). He alludes to the relationship between the child/youth and the staff, and he goes on to state more categorically that “the most valued work for staff is getting with kids, being with kids, both at the level of actual activity and in terms of emotional closeness.” (Weiner, 2002).

Weiner believes that the existential approach’s suitability is enhanced by the fact that it takes whatever the child says at face value while psychoanalysts search for hidden meaning. The symbolic meaning has great value for work with “troubled” children and youth, but when there is an over emphasis of this symbolic meaning and when all behaviour is treated as symbolic then the child/youth is deprived of realistic feedback. Weiner believes that we should “take what the child says and does at face value, which best allows us to provide at once both realistic behavioural consequence and to use the existential method to make behaviour a more meaningful part of the therapeutic encounter” (Weiner, 2002).

Often, when we search for the hidden meaning of behaviour the behaviour itself is not responded to, it is split off in the process of searching for the meaning. In the writer’s experience children and youth are often powerless to articulate what their behaviour means; they are able to describe what they did and why they did it, but when pushed for the ‘hidden’meaning the child/youth is unable to provide answers and the therapist is left to speculate. Psychodynamic formulations do not help the child/ youth until s/he is able to articulate and express what it meant to her/him.

KAREN HECTOR

Hector, K. (2005). The South African context for child and youth care practice. in Garfat, T. and Gannon, B. (eds.). Aspects of Child and Youth Care Practice in the South African Context. Cape Town: Pretext.