Andrew Briggs

• BA(Hons),MA,MA,Mpsych.psych,PhD.
• Head of Department at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

The book is a collection of papers examining the concept of belonging for children in care or adoted. It looks closely at whether attachment is confused with belonging in the minds of referrers to mental health services, and suggsest the two a re different and so expectaions of outcomes of treatment need to be accordingly differentiated.

The concern of this study is a blindness to risk assessment of mental health and safety issues for children and young people by Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) teams when they are insufficiently emotionally contained. The need for social worker membership of CAMHS teams is suggested but not developed, as the focus is unconscious...

Book uses the influential papers of Hamish Canham to explore the benefits of understudying the relationship between practitioners and young people in order to understand the actual wishes and thinking of them.

abstract Mindful of the importance of word usage for accurate verbal or written description the paper aims to develop Esther Bick's caution about the use of words in infant observation and clinical work. It is suggested that this caution was part of Bick's process of creating a state of mind akin to negative capability, allowing for the accurate pe...

This is a transcript of an interview with one of Esther Bick's students. Alessandra Piontelli was asked to think what Bick might have thought about the use of video recording for clinical and observational purposes. She was also asked to talk about her own pioneering work understanding the emotional life and development of the fetus using ultrasoun...

The paper discusses the authors' joint-disciplinary therapeutic work with young children and families referred to their under-fives' service within CAMHS. Their familiarity with the Tavistock under-fives model of early, brief, therapeutic intervention allowed them to adapt it for work with these complex referrals. Their model extended the number of...

The role of a child psychotherapist's gender is not often considered in terms of treatment outcome. This paper discusses how aspects of being a male child psychotherapist influenced the successful treatment of a very young boy with Asperger's Syndrome. The paper highlights how the nature of his very early relationship with his mother and the absenc...

This paper discusses the work of a consultation to a staff group at a residential home for adolescent boys. The work discovered that each encounter increased each group's sense of deprivation. This escalation is understood as their relationship being based upon a spiral of deprivation. In this situation the staff's capacity to think in terms of the...

Chapters develop the observational method of Esther Bick. Focus on infant observation, early development of mental health problems (developing in infancy). Some chapters apply this method to organisational consultancy

This article considers the way final-year students present with agoraphobic and claustrophobic symptoms which have caused them to break down academically before the end of their courses. It presents a brief theoretical discussion of these anxieties in students, and offers a way of thinking about them in terms of a particular understanding of projec...