Workers, groups and gangs: consultation to residential adolescent teams

Abstract

This paper discusses how the internal worlds of adolescents who are looked after in residential care homes impact upon workers and generate complex dynamics within teams. This is especially so regarding internal parental objects and couplings, which inevitably include those of abandoning, abusive and ambivalent parental figures. Versions of these are projected and enacted between adolescents and workers, workers and managers, team and consultant. Conceptual thinking about groups and gangs is drawn upon to help illuminate the emotional phenomena encountered in team consultation meetings as described in the paper. Clinical material is given of working in the transference as consultant to the team, in order to illustrate processes of containment and the opportunity for thinking to take place. In this, there is movement between different states of mind within the team. The paper seeks to demonstrate a way of consulting to residential teams working with looked after adolescents and to show how this can mediate some of the enactments by workers and teams of projected states and transferential phenomena. Associated with this, there can be a deepening of the team's understanding of the emotional experience of the adolescents in their care.

Keywords:

• Consultation
• adolescents
• looked after children
• residential units
• team dynamics
• groups and gangs

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Jenny Sprince for her supervision of this work and to my colleagues in CAMHS and LAC Services.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Annual Conference of the Association of Child Psychotherapists, York, 2006.