Spitting, kicking and stripping: technical difficulties encountered in the treatment of deprived children

Summary — English:

Canham examines the technical challenges of psychotherapy with children who have experienced severe deprivation, violence, and abuse. He distinguishes between violent acting-out that functions as a communication of traumatic experience and violence arising from more destructive or perverse aspects of the child’s functioning. Extreme behaviours such as spitting, kicking, and stripping can therefore carry important communicative meanings that need to be understood rather than simply controlled. The therapist’s countertransference becomes particularly important because the child’s unbearable emotional states may be communicated through the therapist’s own feelings and reactions. The clinical task is to receive and understand the communication while simultaneously maintaining a safe therapeutic setting in which the child can gradually develop the capacity to think about experience rather than only act it out.