This book explores the importance of relationship between child and care system, child and clinician or other practitioner, practitioners with practitioners, or individuals with the organisation in which they work. It presents the analytic and multifaceted centrality of relationship concept.

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