This book is about children in State care and its title - Waiting to be Found - is derived from an observation about such children by the child psychotherapist Hamish Canham. In one of his early papers Canham wrote that children's homes often reminded him of "station waiting rooms with children waiting to move on to their next placement and staff waiting for the next shift, or working as a residential social worker in order to get experience before moving on to do something else or further training." This book takes his comment about waiting rooms as its starting point, with each contributor building upon its central implications. The contributors to this book each explore the importance of relationship; whether between child and care system, child and clinician or other practitioner, practitioners with practitioners, or individuals with the organisation in which they work. Overall they demonstrate when attention is paid to any one of these relationships this determines emotional-psycho-social success for the child, and how when this attention is missing serious issues arise. As a snapshot view of the way Canham's focus is used today they show that he was ahead of his time in thinking about the structure and function of what we now recognise as the corporate parent.
Series Editor's Preface -- Preface -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Canham: Writer and Clinical Thinker -- Focusing on the relationship with the child -- Selected Papers by Hamish Canham -- Growing up in residential care -- The development of the concept of time in fostered and adopted children -- Exporting the Tavistock model to social services: clinical consultative and teaching aspects -- Group and gang states of mind -- The relevance of the Oedipus myth to fostered and adopted children -- Spitting, kicking and stripping: technical difficulties encountered in the treatment of deprived children -- Working with Children in Care -- The expressed wishes and feelings of children -- Innate possibilities: experiences of hope in child psychotherapy -- The riddle of the Sphinx -- Neglect and its effects: understandings from developmental science and the therapist-s countertransference -- Creating a "third position" to explore oedipal dynamics in the task and organization of a therapeutic school -- Facing reality: Oedipus and the organization -- Turning a blind eye or daring to see: how might consultation and clinical interventions help Looked After Children and their carers to cope with mental pain? -- Physical control, strip searching, and segregation: observations on the deaths of children in custody -- Observation, containment, countertransference: the contribution of psychoanalytic thinking to contemporary relationship-based social work practice -- Endpiece -- Publications by Hamish Canham
