Therapeutic Practice in Schools: Working with the Child Within
This book is an indispensable guide to providing therapy services for children and adolescents in primary and secondary school settings. The contributors have extensive experience in the field and carefully examine every aspect of the work, ranging from developing an understanding of the school context in all its complexity, through to what to say and do in challenging therapy sessions and in meetings with school staff or parents and carers.
Therapeutic Practice in Schools opens with an overview of key psychoanalytic concepts informing therapy practice. This is followed by a detailed exploration of the hopes and anxieties raised by providing therapy in schools, the factors that either enable or impede the therapist’s work and how to manage expectations as well as measure outcomes. The practical aspects of delivering therapy sessions are also covered, from the initial assessment phase through recognising and working with anxieties, defences, transference and counter-transference to working with endings. An awareness of the impact of social identity, gender, race and culture on both the therapist and client is woven into the book and is also discussed in depth in a dedicated chapter.
The manual offers a comprehensive yet highly readable guide to the complex world of school-based therapy. It provides practical examples of how therapists translate theory into everyday language that can be understood by their young clients, ensuring that trainees starting a placement in schools, as well as therapists beginning work in the educational setting for the first time, are able to take up their role with confidence.
This is a remarkably thoughtful book that demonstrates so clearly what psychotherapy can do for children and schools to make things more possible. … It is so practical and accessible – down to earth, in fact, in a world of psychotherapy that so many think is up in the clouds.
Peter Wilson, Founder of Young Minds and Clinical Advisor for The Place 2 Be, from the Foreword
Editors
Lyn French, Director of A Space
Lyn first trained in art (MA Goldsmiths) with a focus on conceptual art practice before completing an art therapy training followed by the Birkbeck MSc in Counselling & Psychotherapy with Children and Adolescents and then a psychoanalytic psychotherapy training. She was a staff member on the Birkbeck MSc course for over 10 years and has taught and supervised therapists at A Space as well as in the community. Along with Reva Klein, Lyn co-edited Therapeutic Practice in Schools: Working with the Child Within, Therapeutic Practice in Schools: The Contemporary Adolescent and Bringing our Histories into School-based Therapy: How our backstories enrich our work with children and adolescents, all published by Routledge.
Reva Klein, Senior Supervisor, A Space
Reva isa child and adolescent counsellor and adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist who supervises therapists at A Space and sees clients and supervisees in private practice. Previously a freelance journalist, writer and editor, Reva taught journalism at Goldsmiths College for many years. She is the author of three books on education: Defying Disaffection, Citizens by Right and We Want our Say and is the co-author of Reluctant Refuge: The Story of Asylum in Britain. She twice won the Commission for Racial Equality’s Race in the Media Award for her writing in the Times Educational Supplement and she founded and edited The International Journal on School Disaffection, an Anglo-American publication now in its second decade. In the 1990s Reva sat on the Secondary School Reform Committee of Unesco. Along with Lyn French, Reva co-edited Therapeutic Practice in Schools: Working with the Child Within, Therapeutic Practice in Schools: The Contemporary Adolescent and Bringing our Histories into School-based Therapy: How our backstories enrich our work with children and adolescents, all published by Routledge.
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