In the spaces between – sustaining creativity in child psychotherapy

Abstract

The following paper has grown out of a spoken presentation given to the annual conference of the ACP in June 2012. Beginning from ideas that have emerged from reading and experiencing the work of Bion, the presentation attempted to apply these ideas to some of the issues that face child psychotherapists working in publicly funded health services today, and to suggest that rather than truncate our clinical and professional thinking to meet the demands of shrinking budgets and evidence based practice, we should embrace our capacities for observation and ‘reverie’ not only within our clinical work, but in the professional activities beyond. Using brief discussion of the work of artists, the paper revives our knowledge of the unconscious mind’s potential for repair, often making creative developments out of forgotten resources in unnoticed spaces. In fact it is the forgotten, unnoticed and discarded that have the potential to be the richest resources in a time when more conventional resources are fading.

Keywords:

• void
• imagination
• dreaming
• reverie
• psychic skin
• second skin
• absent object

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the generosity of Mali Morris in allowing me to reproduce her painting here and also to the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Photography Archives for permission to reproduce Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void. The present article could not have been completed without the encouragement of friends and colleagues who have given invaluable support. I am particularly indebted to the memory of Dr Simon Heywood whose very creative approach to teaching neurology to undergraduates at the University of Warwick has had a lasting influence on my own thinking.