1st Edition
Paediatrics, Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis Through counter-transference to case management
How do children and parents shape clinical practice? How can clinicians learn from the impact of their patients upon them? How do we recognise if health care practices are adversely affecting health care?
Children's health problems can place enormous strain on both children and their families. Whether symptoms are acute or chronic, assessment and treatment can be confusing and frightening even when the illness itself is not dangerous. Understanding the impact of illness on emotions, relationships and development is an essential part of providing good health care services. For health care professionals it is necessary to understand how their clinical practice affects their patients and how this reciprocal relationship shapes good or bad practice.
Introducing key psychoanalytic concepts Adrian Sutton illustrates through detailed clinical studies how psychoanalytic theory can be applied in a health care setting involving children and their families. Paediatrics, Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis specifically describes the impact of the patient on the professional, how conscious and unconscious elements need to be taken into account, and to what extent these can influence practice enhancing diagnostic and therapeutic treatment.
Paediatrics, Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis is an exploration of the central importance of the patient-doctor relationship and how the psychodynamics of this relationship are crucial in providing information that can aid treatment. It will be of interest to child mental health professionals – psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, paediatric practitioners and those working in social welfare and educational settings.
Foreword. Key Concepts from Psychoanalysis. Paediatrics, Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Finding one’s Place. Stepping into the Unknown. Diagnostics and Therapeutics: Interwoven Processes. Motion and Mentation. Becoming a Specialist in Not-Knowing. Practising as a Specialist in Not-Knowing. Untranquilitis. Parents in Peril. Is Good Medicine History? Notes.
Biography
Adrian Sutton is Honorary Senior Teaching Fellow at Manchester Medical School, University of Manchester. His publications span psychoanalytic approaches in child psychiatry, medical education and ethics.
"Adrian Sutton applies the overlapping paradigms of paediatrics and psychoanalysis to illuminate the complexity of its tasks. Taking an approach that puts centre stage the dynamics of relationships, Sutton brings the practice of child and adolescent psychiatry back to its roots, which privileges the nuances of the child’s inner world in its family and social environment, never forgetting the lived experience in the body, elaborated in fantasy in the mind. This is an exceptionally valuable addition to the literature at a time when the temptation of resorting to simplistic solutions dominates the thinking around child and adolescent mental health." - Angela Joyce, Child and Adult psychoanalyst, Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
