The ‘hostile environment’ and the therapeutic journey of an adolescent girl^*

ABSTRACT

This paper is drawn from doctoral research investigating whether cross-cultural psychoanalytic psychotherapy and the transference relationship can be helpful in the development of the self of an adolescent BAME patient. I will refer to some of the findings from the doctoral research and from the material in the patient’s three-and-a-half years intensive psychotherapy, to show how her ideas of self, ‘other’, gender and sexuality were affected, in a particular way, by her experience of inhabiting family, social and political environments she experienced as hostile. This paper will describe how child psychotherapy can be crucial in supporting adolescents negotiate their identity, when the environments they inhabit act to impede this. I will pay particular attention to how the transference and countertransference can be used to understand and tend to the patient’s ideas of self and other that have been informed by the post-colonial beliefs embedded in the environments they inhabit.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-colonialism
• maternal function
• cross-cultural psychotherapy
• transference/countertransference
• hostile environment
• adolescent therapy

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to Helene Dubinsky’s clinical supervision on my work with Anita. I am similarly indebted to my Doctoral Supervision team (Michael Rustin, Judy Shuttleworth and Stephen Cowden) for supporting me in capturing Anita’s unique story and journey within the research framework.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* This paper draws on my thesis on a single case-study of a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist working with a female adolescent patient from a Muslim Bangladeshi background. She has consented for the work undertaken with her to be published.

1. The details and identifying information of everyone referred to in this paper have been changed to protect their identities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sean Junor-Sheppard

Sean Junor-Sheppard is a Senior Child and Adolescent Psychanalytic Psychotherapist in the Bexley CAMHS’s Looked After and Adopted Children team and their Under Fives and Perinatal team. His Ph.D. on the investigation of the transference in cross-cultural psychoanalytic psychotherapy reflects his interest in exploring psychoanalysis’s potential to respond to the effect on the patient’s self from the social, political and religious contexts they inhabit.