Spanning presence and absence. Separation anxiety in the early years.

Book Synopsis. This volume is the result of over twenty years of therapeutic interventions with families within the Tavistock Clinic's Under Fives Service. It describes in detail the process of understanding young children's communications and behaviour and the dynamics of family relationships within the consulting room in a lively, accessible style. It covers common themes in work with young children such as disruptive, angry behaviour, separation and sleep difficulties, and problems in the parent/couple relationship. This book is essential reading for all early years professionals hoping to gain a greater understanding of the technique, observational skills and theory which underlie a psychodynamic approach to work with the under fives

A psychoanalytic concept illustrated: Will, must, may, can — revisiting the survival function of primitive omnipotence

The author explores the linear thread connecting the theory of Freud and Klein, in terms of the central significance of the duality of the life and death instinct and the capacity of the ego to tolerate contact with internal and external reality. Theoretical questions raised by later authors, informed by clinical work with children who have suffered deprivation and trauma in infancy, are then considered. Theoretical ideas are illustrated with reference to observational material of a little boy who suffered deprivation and trauma in infancy. He was first observed in the middle of his first year of life while he was living in foster care, and then later at the age of two years and three months, when he had been living with his adoptive parents for more than a year

Transparency-generated trust: the problematic theorization of public audit

Public audit has been under‐theorized, the existing literature too dominated by institutional description. Public audit may be interpreted as promoting transparency in order to generate trust, thus leading to legitimacy. Disaggregating transparency and trust, the article develops a subtler analysis of their role in public audit. By integrating collibration into the processes of economization, the governance of public audit and its operational activities are illuminated. Expected to be bloodhound, not just watchdog, public audit space is currently contested and can be forcibly evacuated. Transparency‐generated trust might be the outcome, but providing a well‐evidenced transparency should be public audit's mission

The psychic life of fragments: splitting from Ferenczi to Klein

The present paper starts from the reflection that there is a curious “phenomenological gap” in psychoanalysis when it comes to processes of splitting and to describing the “life” of psychic fragments resulting from processes of splitting. In simpler terms, we are often in a position to lack a precise understanding of what is being split and how the splitting occurs. I argue that although Melanie Klein’s work is often engaged when talking of splitting (particularly through discussions on identification, projection and projective identification), there are some important phenomenological opacities in her construction. I show that by orchestrating a dialogue between Melanie Klein and Sándor Ferenczi, we arrive at a fuller and more substantive conception of psychic splitting and of the psychic life of fragments which are the result of splitting. This is even more meaningful because there are some unacknowledged genealogical connections between Ferenczian concepts and Kleinian concepts, which I here explore. While with Klein we remain in the domain of “good” and “bad” objects—polarised objects which are constantly split and projected—with Ferenczi we are able to also give an account of complicated forms of imitation producing psychic fragments and with a “dark” side of identification, which he calls “identification with the aggressor”. While attempting to take steps toward imagining a dialogue between Klein and Ferenczi, I note a certain silent “Ferenczian turn” in a late text by Melanie Klein, “On the Development of Mental Functioning”, written in 1958. In particular, I reflect on her reference to some “terrifying figures” of the psyche, which cannot be accounted for simply as the persecutory parts of the super-ego but are instead more adequately read as more enigmatic and more primitive psychic fragments, resulting from processes of splitting