Working outside the therapy room in a therapeutic school

This chapter considers the work child psychotherapists can do within a therapeutic school, outside individual child psychotherapy. Using an observational style, it gives the reader an insight into what life in this school with troubled and often violent children can look like. It focuses on two children with traumatic histories, who are aggressive and hard to care for. It shows the detailed thinking of child psychotherapists in day-to-day interactions, and how psychoanalytic observational skills are used to help those working on the front line to understand what children are communicating. This can enable children and staff to maintain hope, develop new ways of relating, and interrupt cycles of rejection and exclusion that are so common for such children