Bernard Roberts

I am a Child & Adolescent and Adult Analyst of The British Psychoanalytical Society where I am also a Training and Supervising Analyst. I am currently Chair of the Trustees of The Brent Centre for Young People.

I trained at The Cassel Hospital and Tavistock Clinic. I was a consultant in the Health Service for over thirty years first of all as a consultant then Medical Director of Kingston and District Community NHS Trust and then consultant and Head of Profession at Central North West London Foundation NHS Trust. I have been Head of The Child and Adolescent Clinic and Safeguarding Lead at The Institute of Psychoanalysis.

I work in private practice.

“A Child’s Use of Psychoanalysis in Developmental Struggles with Confusing Objects”

In this paper I use extracts from the clinical encounter with a child who started a four-year analysis just before her 7^th birthday to illustrate the way bodily actions depicted painful struggles in her inner world. The external world had presented adults who behaved so inconsistently and unpredictably that the child was confused between pretend and genuine feelings. The struggles came alive in moving ways in the to and fro of the transference and countertransference and were often dramatised in the child’s relationship to and with her body. In child analysis there is not infrequently bodily contact with the analyst, conveying a great deal of communication and meaning. Sometimes it seemed urgent for the child to use parts of her own and the analyst’s body as the only available route both to deal with and communicate her internal reality. I will focus on this aspect of the analysis particularly in relation to the risk of consolidation of perverse structures and defenses into adult life.