The duty to care and the need to split

This paper arises out of psychoanalytically oriented consultancy to teams of staff in the helping professions where there is a statutory 'duty to care'. It takes as its premise the seemingly paradoxical hypothesis that workers may need to split off part of their emotional experience in order to preserve their own mental health and provide reliable services to their clients. I argue that while a professional 'duty to care' requires us to be emotionally 'in touch', the demands of our clients together with the demands of the institutional response to the 'duty to care' cause us to split off parts of our awareness. I also argue that provided the splitting does not become extreme we are doing no more or less than the rest of society. In other words, there is a degree of 'normal splitting' which numbs our awareness of danger and destructiveness and seeks to protect us from too much anxiety and pain. Yet if professional workers are charged with the responsibility of assessing risk and acting accordingly for the protection of all concerned they need ways of being 'in touch' (re-integrating the splits) for some or enough of the time. Finally, I will describe ways of being 'in touch', illustrating the difficulty and the pain of re-integrating the splits and some of the insights that can arise out of this work with examples from my consultancy work.