HELPLESSNESS IN COUNTERTRANSFERENCE: FEATURES OF PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC WORK WITH CHILDREN WHEN CHILDHOOD AND THERAPIES END, BUT THE WAR DOES NOT

Abstract

Abstract. The article proposes a topic for a collegial discussion related to the feelings of anxiety and helplessness in the child therapist and the clinical value of the psychoanalytic therapist’s vulnerability to this helplessness and identification with it, so that the primitive “helpless” aspects of the young patient’s psyche find a way of creative progressive consolation. The author’s thoughts are illustrated by fragments of clinical work and self-observations of child psychoanalytic therapists who worked together from 2022 to 2024 in the project “Playing Under Fire”, as well as by reminders of the analysis of a ten-year-old boy, Richard, conducted and described by Melanie Klein during the bombing of London. Ukrainian child psychotherapists, basing their work on psychoanalytic concepts, rely on ideas (consonant with the ideas of M. Klein) of analyzing the child’s internal anxieties, treating them as awakened, not caused, by the war. But in a situation of endless tension and uncertainty of war, the feeling of helplessness, which is unconsciously and nonverbally communicated by the childpatient in a state of regression or suppression of development and creativity, and which the child’s therapist feels, can sometimes be the only thing that internally connects the child with an adult. Such feelings and states can be regarded by therapists as a consequence of their own burnout, inexperience or unsuitability of the given child (or their own) for work in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. However, it makes sense to consider the therapists’ helplessness as unconscious communication, as part of countertransference, as an understanding of the child-patient. The therapist’s openness and vulnerability to this helplessness makes him (her), as a good enough mother, able to identify with the “helplessness of the infant” and perceive regressive manifestations as communication, to remain with the child “without memory and desire” in order to be able to recognize and create with the child meanings and potential space for words, symbolic play, images, fantasies that will provide access to the inner anxieties that the war has raised and intensified.