Child and Adolescent Analysis - Clinical Work Discussion Seminar | 19th April

Ricky Emanuel -''I am a child, adolescent and adult psychotherapist who trained at the Tavistock clinic. I worked in various CAMHS services being head of child psychotherapy in Camden and Islington as well as head of child psychotherapy at the Royal Free hospital for over 30 years. I managed the commissioning of CAMHS services in Camden for several years and led a restructuring of the whole service to create the entity of Camden CAMHS.  I retired from the NHS in 2017 and now work privately with adults but also supervise child psychotherapists, trainees and qualified, as well as teach at the Tavistock clinic, Birmingham Trust for psychoanalytic psychotherapy and at the Centro Studi Martha Harris in Florence.

My main interests are working with trauma and bereavement as well as the interface of neuroscience, mindfulness, and body states in psychotherapy.'' 

Summary

''My paper describes Psychotherapy of a bereaved adolescent with an eating disorder. This 14-year-old girl had broken down 6 years after the suicide of her beloved father and had stopped functioning completely. She would not eat, drink, talk, go to school, and seemed more to be suffering from a pervasive refusal syndrome. She was admitted to hospital for refeeding as she was in a dangerous physical condition. The paper describes my attempts to reach her. Fortunately, she was able to relate her dreams to me although would do so in a strangulated whisper which was difficult to hear. Gradually we built up a picture of her internal world where her father was neither alive nor dead and was beckoning to her to join him in death. Her identification with him and intense hostility to her mother was a way of holding onto him by becoming him and so not grieving his loss. The work unearthed a primal rage at him through his betrayal of her by leaving in a such a brutal manner.  We were able to identify a narcissistic organisation within a psychic retreat which protected from facing any healthy mourning of her father or disappointment in her mother’s capacity of know her. Without her dream life being accessible, this young person would not have been able to recover from her breakdown.''

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