Paper: Psychodynamic Thinking in Schools; Understanding Troubled Children

Terms of Reference

[1] In the discussion, ‘Mother’ refers to the parent who carries a baby and gives birth, and is not intended to indicate female gender exclusivity. Teachers and children are generally referred to as ‘they’.   In the case study, the adolescent described identifies as female and is therefore referred to using ‘she` and ‘her’ pronouns.  Her mother and aunt are referred to in the same way.

 

[2] The paper uses a psychodynamic framework to think about children and young people of school age who cannot make use of educational experiences; who can neither thrive in school environments nor develop normative relationships with their teachers and peers.    These children are often found in lower learning groups of various kinds; ‘inclusion’ units, in receipt of special needs support or, commonly, on reduced timetables or excluded from schools.

 

[3] The Paper was originally written in 2018 for teachers who had previously little or no access to psychodynamic thinking.   It was written as an introductory piece for a module in Social Inclusion in Schools as part of an MA Programme entitled Leading for Social Advantage designed for teachers aspiring to senior leadership working for an Academy Chain of Secondary and Primary Schools in the North-West of England.  The degree was validated by a university and was taught on Saturday mornings in an empty, newly built, vast secondary school in the middle of a large estate where the families were almost all categorised as being socially disadvantaged.

 

Background, Context and Inspiration

The paper, in its original iteration, began with an exploration of both the concept and contemporary discourse of ‘social disadvantage’, using definitions from The Department for Education (DfE) and organisations such as the Fisher Family Trust, The Rowntree Foundation and Barnado's. 

 

I had applied these educational discourses to fundamental psychodynamic ideas.  The inspiration for which was inspired by my own experience back in the 1980s when I was teaching in a school in London for children with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (EBD) and participating in Isca Whittenberg`s course, ‘Aspects of Counselling in Education’, at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, ‘The Tavistock’.   This Tavistock experience had such a profound impact on my understanding of ‘troubled’ and ‘difficult’ children and my relationship to them that, ever since and over some forty years, I have sought opportunities to teach, study, research, supervise and share this thinking with other teachers.  I could never hope to emulate the brilliance of Isca Wittenberg or her contemporaries, or indeed, replicate the unique teaching and learning experience found at the Tavistock but I had hoped that I could authentically pass something, very important, on. 

 

The Community of APPCIOS is now providing me with the opportunity to reflect on these ideas and experiences as, now at the end of my career, I attribute the inspiration for this paper, once again, to Isca Wittenberg and her latest and, probably, final book, ‘Experiencing Endings and Beginnings’ (2023, Saltzberger - Wittenberg). 

 

The psychodynamic perspective

The two central tenets of Psychodynamic Theory that I have chosen to think about in this paper, which I first explored with the Academy teachers are:  how a Personality Develops from a Psychodynamic perspective and the concept of Projective Identification.   Please remember when reading this piece that these ideas were completely new to my teacher/students and forgive any over-obvious explanations.

 

Personality Development

How a personality is formed, viewed from a Psychodynamic perspective, offers knowledge about emotional development which explains something very important about children who cannot make good use of what schools have to offer and who instead find ways to resist both learning and relationships.

 

Melanie Klein, ^[1] the first post-Freudian analyst to work with children, wrote that,

 

 ‘healthy emotional development is the bedrock of a healthy emotional life, it leads to a healthy state of mind, a zest for life and learning, the ability to make and sustain positive relationships and a resilience to adversity’ (Klein in Waddell, 1998, p.2).

 

Psychodynamic understanding about healthy emotional development, how we think and how we relate both to people and to life events, accepts that these are crucially shaped by what happens to us as infants and, in particular, by the first two years of our lives (Miller,1999 ; Waddell, 1998).    A central notion of the Psychodynamic theory of child development is that for children to develop a secure emotional internal framework they must experience, and so internalise, what are described as maternal and paternal functions.  These ideas are seminal and located in a particular time and discourse, and are part of Klein’s (1921) central concept of Object Relations where, broadly, maternal functions might be understood as providing care, comfort, nurture and sustenance, whilst paternal functions might be understood as providing boundaries, authority and protection.   Applied in a contemporary context, these functions are not consigned to gender.   Indeed, in functioning families of any and all gender configurations, these roles are now understood as interchangeable and in single-parent families, both roles are held by one parent.  Gender politics, gender functioning and role division in parenting continue to be much debated but ideas about the importance of shared and interchangeable ‘functions’ provided to babies by their parents remain largely uncontested.   Within these parameters, and viewed through the psychoanalytic theoretical lens, there are two key maternal functions identified by Bion (1962), Klein, (1997) and Winnicott (1992), which shape the baby’s central nervous system and build the brain which, crucially, impact on a baby’s emotional development and future mental well-being (Gerhardt, 2004).  These functions are known as attunement and containment. 

 

Attunement

Donald Winnicott (1896 – 1971), an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who understood the earliest mother-infant bond in terms of how well a mother was able to make her baby feel safe, described a ‘good enough’ mother or a ‘good enough’ experience of being mothered, based on the ordinary love that a mother feels for their baby (Winnicott, 1992).    He described a mother’s ability to relieve their baby’s discomfort and to provide the baby with an experience of being understood as an instinctive ‘tuning in’ to their baby’s needs.

 

The children at the centre of this paper, the children who cannot make use of the richness of education, may have not experienced ‘good enough’ maternal attunement for a great number of reasons.  Their birth mothersmay have been drug- or alcohol-addicted or so preoccupied with domestic violence, unhealthy relationships, poverty or their own mental health needs that they were unable to provide the ‘right amount’ of ‘good enough’ care for their babies.  In situations where children have continued to be parented throughout infancy, childhood and adolescence by birth mothers who cannot manage their own emotional lives, children struggle to regulate responses to their own emotions.  For babies removed from their mothers in infancy, their journey then becomes one of readjusting to one or more replacement care-givers.    Some never find a permanent or reliable replacement family and, even those who do, continue to struggle to make sense of their frightening early experiences and overwhelming feelings of abandonment. 

 

How attunement works in school.

Children who have had the early experience of an attuned mother do not continue to need this beyond school age as through an attuned mother they have learned to attune to their own emotions, and to communicate and manage their needs and feelings.   Thus, they are equipped to develop relationships with teachers that are based on self-reliance, manageable emotional need, respect for, and trust of, adults.  Children who have not been attuned to have not learned that they can regulate strong emotions and they can neither recognise nor identify their own feelings.  What happens to these children is that, instead of being able to say that they are, for example, anxious, sad, worried or frightened, they ‘act out’ their feelings and become aggressive, angry, frightening or have a chaotic, frenzied response to their unrecognised emotions.   Children’s fear and confusion about their own feelings and rage about not being understood, the ‘no-one gets me/no-one cares’ position, become entrenched as an impulse response.

 

Containment

A second maternal function that can be mirrored in schools is containment (Bion 1962).  This is the state of mind in which a mother responds to their baby’s communications. A mother who has enough space in their own mind to calm their distressed baby, to register their hunger pains, discomfort or panic and to respond to them in ways that remove these feelings and replace them with feelings of love, peace and calm, according to Bion, (1962) gives the baby a feeling that their distress does not overwhelm their mother; indeed the opposite, that they have the capacity to take their distress and replace it with what Bion

(ibid) called ‘reverie’.  Anyone who has held or witnessed a baby held who has moved from a heightened state of distress through to a peaceful calmness knows that ‘reverie’ is both observable and palpable.

 

In terms of a baby’s healthy emotional development, containment is an experience crucial to the baby’s beginning to understand their own feelings and being able to manage them.  The more babies have experiences of containing-mothers the more they feel contained, and moreover, know that both they and their feelings are containable (Bion,1962 Container/Contained).   The main way in which mothers offer their babies containment is through their ability to remain calm when their babies are in distress and can retain their ability to think on behalf of the baby.  Babies who have not been effectively contained retain feelings that they are not safe, and that people and the world are unpredictable.  Infants who do not have good containment experiencesfor enough of the time are often babies who become toddlers, children and adolescents who cannot regulate their emotional states. 

 

How containment works in schools

Schools and teachers can be very effective containers for chaotic children.  Teachers, who are themselves emotionally regulated authority figures, school rules and timetables can all provide a level of certainty and predictability that can begin to make vulnerable children feel safer.  An unquestioning adherence to rules, boundaries and consistency are all aspects of much-needed containment.  The implicit and explicit message that ‘adults are in charge’ is hugely important.  Previously uncontained children respond well to strong containment in schools. They become afraid in the face of inconsistency and uncertainty.

 

Teachers, for the best of reasons, who may be flexible, changeable and inconsistent in their expectations of how children will behave, create feelings of huge anxiety in children who have not been emotionally contained by their parents.  Anxiety feeds fear and fear leads to outbursts in response to what is felt as a dangerous situation. 

 

The impact of early trauma  

Infants, children and young people who have been subject to early experiences that are not attuned or have not been emotionally contained, feel frightened and panicked to the extent that their stress levels become permanently high as they are in a constant state of fear and helplessness.   Cortisol produced by heightened and prolonged anxiety affects development of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that organises memory, and may also alter the balance between serotonin and dopamine, which regulate mood (Gerhardt, 2004).  Extreme anxiety creates a ‘fight, flight, freeze’ response and anxious children become constantly reactive to perceived danger everywhere; keeping themselves safe through learned defensive responses feels like their only option. They may also develop a heightened sense of arousal to danger.  They may not be able to be still and may also be desperately anxious. These children are often frenzied and frantic in their movements, or may behave in opposite ways and become closed down, finding ways to avoid people and situations.   Miller (1999) described how for infants who have had ‘bad early experiences’, the scene is set for them…

…to have the potential of growing up suspicious and mistrustful, easily upset, provoking negative reactions that will confirm the idea that people are innately hostile and the world is a hard place. (Miller, 1999, p.38) 

Research shows that by the age of three years, a neglected and traumatised infant will already be aggressive and lack empathy (Gerhardt 2004; Music, 2011; Music 2014; Sroufe, 2005). Kaufman (1997) regards these early biological responses as precursors of psychological states of anxiety and depression.   For children whose infancies and childhoods have essentially been hijacked, the consequences are stark and long-term, and are difficult, if not impossible, to modify or eradicate (Music 2014; Steel, 2003,). They are likely to experience ‘profound, emotional behavioural, psychological, cognitive and social problems’ (Perry et al, 1995, p273) and there is a strong likelihood that they will develop neuropsychiatric disorders in adolescence or adulthood (ibid). 

 

Trauma-based behaviour in schools

In schools, children and young people who have been traumatised by chronically bad early experiences are most recognisable by their inability to regulate their bodies and their emotions.   Emotionally harmful early experiences will have led to a central nervous system programmed to expect the world to be a frightening and unsafe place. The brain is constantly on the lookout for perceived danger and the primitive survival fight/flight/freeze response kicks in the second the child feels unsafe.     When the brain switches to survival mode, higher order functions of the brain, such as logic and reasoning, switch off (Music, 2014).   Children feel the stress in their bodies. They feel compelled to escape from the perceived danger. This is why, in heightened states, they run or threaten or become aggressive and, in calmer states, need to move continuously in order to attempt to regulate the overwhelming anxiety felt in their bodies.  Furthermore, children whose brains are wired to escape danger do not have access, in those moments of severe anxiety, to the part of their brain that can understand or explain their actions or repair the damage or harm they may have caused.

Children who behave aggressively towards their teachers and other children, who flaunt authority and constantly disrupt the learning of other pupils, are often excluded from mainstream schools. Their need, expressed through their extreme behaviour, is often to return to an infantile place where one or more adults offer them an undivided ‘maternal’ experience of attunement and containment alongside a ‘paternal’ experience of authority and very firm boundaries.   Children who have not had a ‘good enough’ early experience of attuned, containing and regulated parents continue to need these attachment experiences.   Without parental attachment ever being replicated, making use of education and thriving in life is a sad and lonely struggle.  Mainstream schools are not often organised in ways which can offer a model of learning based on this positive attachment relationship with teachers.  Instead, discourses of a challenging or disruptive nature prevail.

 

Projective Identification

A second aspect of applying a psychodynamic framework for thinking to schools is that we can begin to know that the difficult feelings that children and young people experience are often overwhelming and unbearable for them, and these feelings are unconsciously transferred, or given, to another to feel and bear on their behalf.  This is known as projective identification and refers to an unconscious interpersonal interaction in which a projected feeling from one person (in this case the child) is felt by the recipient (the teacher) who experiences it as though it is their own feeling.  An example of this is when a teacher who is perfectly competent and confident in most situations finds themselves feeling anxious, frightened, angry or useless with a particular group of children or individual child.  When understood, these feelings can be a useful indicator to attune to what a child is feeling and a guide to how to offer a helpful response.

 

As an illustration these are two quotations from an article by Stronach (see note), ^[2] taken from Wright ( 2009),  Every Child Matters: discourses of challenging behaviour, Pastoral Care in Education [Crossfer], Google Scholar]

 

Teacher A. ‘And there’s one kid that actually I cannot stand, I hate him.  I think the reason I do not like him is that he has been re‐integrated into the system … I think I have taken a step back and thought how I am with him, he has no idea that I hate him … he is a complete bastard and I really don’t like him, because I do take what he says personally and I think he is out of order and I think he should get into trouble for, and he doesn’t’. (Stronach, 2009, p. 169)

Teacher B. ‘I mean how many times I have been in tears in my room saying, "I'm leaving and they’re saying, `No you’re not`. `I am`. I have just been crying the first half of term, it’s dead hard and I’m just so tired”. (Stronach, 2009, p. 169)

 

How Projective Identification works in schools

This is the case of a 13-year-old girl, K, whom I met in a school in Liverpool.

K’s mother had been an alcohol and drug user for most of K’s life.  She had had all four of her children removed into care. K’s older brother was living in a secure children’s home, K’s younger sisters had both been adopted, into different families aged six months and two years.   K had been put in the care of her maternal aunt at around nine years and although contact with her birth mother was supposed to be limited, spent much of her time between her aunt`s and mother’s homes and was constantly drawn into their chaos.  K did not know who her father was.   K’s mother was expecting a baby, her fifth child, and had come off alcohol and drugs in an attempt to be able to keep the baby.  This was extremely unsettling to K, who could not understand why she couldn’t return to her mum now that her mum was clean.   K became very challenging with her aunt, whose capacity to parent her was already limited, until eventually K’s aunt declared that she could no longer cope and K was removed to a children’s home.  This home closed after K had been there four months and she was placed in another home where there were two younger boys who were settled but whom K bullied.  As a consequence, K was given notice of her removal from this placement.  By the time she was thirteen, K had been repeatedly abandoned, had no secure place to live and no reliable adults to care for her. From the age of four, when she was first known to social services, K had had a different social worker every year.

 

In school, K was out of control and a huge challenge. This was already her second Secondary School, having been excluded initially from the final year of Primary School and then her first Secondary School. This new school was committed to keeping K but K did not have a relationship with any of the staff; none of them knew her history.   She could not engage in learning in any meaningful way and was extremely noisy and disruptive in class, in corridors, in the lunch hall, everywhere.  She swore and threatened to punch teachers and found many ways to challenge authority, tearing up books and throwing her equipment or her work across rooms.  She sought out other disruptive girls and encouraged them to leave classes and maraud with her around the school and its grounds, generally causing havoc. 

 

The feelings experienced by all of her teachers were largely that they could not manage her. They were very angry that they should have to teach her at all.  Everyone’s reaction to K was to get her out of their classrooms, into the ‘inclusion room’ or off the premises altogether, as long as she was out of their sight.  The Learning Mentor in the inclusion room was pregnant and fearful of K’s threat of violence.    Soon, the Leadership Team began to communicate a strong desire to exclude K from school altogether.  Everyone felt that they did not want to take any responsibility for K but also that someone else had failed, not them.   There was talk of ‘teacher X who had poor discipline’ and the too-involved teacher Y who ‘let her get away with murder’.

 

The point of projective identification in action is that K could not manage any of her feelings and so unconsciously projected them, pushed them, into every authority figure she encountered.  If asked about how they felt about themselves in relationship to K, all her teachers used words that actually described aspects of K’s feelings about herself.    They reported that she made them feel at best inadequate and incompetent and on the worst days, utterly useless. They disliked her intensely and said that they were fearful of the harm she might do to other pupils.  K’s unbearable feelings were unconsciously projected onto her teachers.  Sadly for K, her teachers couldn’t bear the feelings either and were collectively overwhelmed by them.  None of them could see her very skilfully disguised vulnerability and rock bottom self-esteem. 

 

K’s need was for someone to offer her an experience of being parented. This was a very well disguised primitive, infantile need and anyone attempting to offer her such a relationship was faced with K’s powerful hostility, aggression, ridicule and rejection. Clearly in a school environment K’s needs were very difficult to meet.  At the same time, she was similarly rejecting any attempts to form relationships in the children’s home and was constantly running away to return to her mother. Unfortunately, meetings between K’s mum, aunt, children’s home and school were always adversarial, described to me as ‘episodes of Jeremy Kyle’.  It was very difficult for anyone to take the role of adult and to take some authority over K’s life.

 

When parents reject or can’t care for their children, children feel it as their fault and as a consequence of their own defects.   K’s parental figures had been unreliable, weak and easily manipulated in the case of her mother and maternal aunt, and entirely absent in the case of her father.  Her expectation, her ‘internal working model’ therefore, was that parental (authority) figures were unable to manage her; she was too difficult, too unlovable. She also had an expectation that she would be rejected again.   The feelings that teachers held on her behalf were that they were inadequate, they did not have the capacity to manage her, they wanted to get her out of sight, to abandon her, let her be someone else’s problem; they were angry, they did not think she was worth their time.  All of these feelings reflected K’s experience of her relationship with adults so far in her life.  She projected her feelings through her rejecting and angry behaviours and so they were ‘felt for her’ by any authority figure who came close.

 

The idea is that children subconsciously project these feelings and watch to see what others do. The challenge posed by this psychodynamic idea is that if teachers, as a first step, can demonstrate that they can bear these feelings and not act on them, in this case not exclude or reject K, then K gets a message that these feelings are actually bearable, by an adult strong enough; that strong authority figures do exist and can manage her, so that then she may have a chance, with help, to bear her the tragedy of her own life.

 

As the example of K shows, the feelings that the teacher has about the child act as vital clues to how the child is feeling.  This way of thinking requires us to suspend our natural reaction to challenging behaviour; that the child is quite deliberately making our life a misery, has no respect, is wilfully making bad choices, does not care and does not want to behave or learn.  Whilst these things may feel true on the surface, psychodynamic thinking asks that we look deeper and further and consider this destructive behaviour towards self and others as a communication of the abject distress that the child is experiencing. 

 

A child who leaves a teacher feeling a failure has a belief about themselves that they are a failure; a child who makes a teacher feel scared, out of control, panicked, themselves feel all of these things.  A child who is angry, aggressive and even violent in school is likely to be feeling enraged, terrified, believing that they must defend themselves from terrible danger.  This way of thinking is challenging and not easy. It requires being able to step out of the emotion of the situation and take time to think about the child by examining our own feelings.  Understanding ‘projective identification’, or recognising feelings that are too much for the child to bear, are passed from the child to ‘another’ and are felt acutely, sometimes physically, by ‘the other’, takes time, space and practice.   It is when a child and a teacher have a particularly emotionally loaded relationship (positive or negative) and often when one or other of them has invested something additional, that the feeling is most likely to be ‘passed on’. 

 

Teachers are not therapists

Many would say that teachers have too much to do to act as counsellors or social workers and this may well be true. But, learning enough about the ways in which a personality can become damaged and understanding that the consequent behaviours and ways of thinking in children that are destructive to themselves and those around them are a direct result of adverse early experience and the consequent development of a negative sense of self is a very powerful tool for teachers.  Every day, children act out for their teachers and their peers their emotional needs, their feelings of despair, abandonment, helplessness and lack of control over their lives. The invitation that children offer teachers is to demonstrate to them that as adults we can bear their powerfully negative, and sometimes overwhelmingly destructive, feelings.

 

Melanie Klein believed that ‘children unconsciously work to create a world which mirrors their own internal world’ (Klein, 1946), and so by listening and watching the children and ‘feeling’ our responses to their behaviours we can construct a meaning for those behaviours, not as deliberate attempts to undermine us but as desperate attempts to communicate pain and anguish. To see, to listen and to hear do not come without personal cost but to take the time to think together with colleagues in non-competitive ways about troubled children in order to find perspectives that are empathetic and objective cannot be a luxury.

 

^[1] Melanie Klein followed Freud and was the pioneer of psychoanalysis with children.

Klein, M. (1946) Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. In: M. Klein (1997) Envy and Gratitude. London, Vintage.

 

^[2] Stronach , I. 2009 . Globalizing education, educating the local: how method made us mad , London : Routledge .  [Crossref], [Google Scholar]