Main description:

Each of us has an inner world, influenced by experience, environment and the people and places we encounter. As individuals engaged with children and those around them, educational psychologists enter a multitude of systems and relationships with the intention of helping. This often involves working in a context of confusion, conflict and creativity, a dynamic tension which is reflected in the chapters of this book.
Designed to give both students and practitioners access to the experience of engaging with a dynamic unconscious, this volume investigates some of the key tenets and principles of psychoanalytic theory and demonstrates ways in which educational psychologists have used both theory and practice in their roles. Each chapter approaches a recognisable activity from educational psychology practice and provides an account of how psychoanalytic theories about our unique inner worlds and our unconscious processes can inform and enrich these interactions.

Contents:

Introduction A theoretical exposition
Arnold, Bartle and Eloquin
Assessment
1. EP Assessment: A Psychoanalytic Approach
Liz Kennedy
2. Surfacing Defended Narratives: Psychodynamic approaches to the assessment of emotional wellbeing in children and young people.
Halit Hulusi
3. Use of Projective Techniques in Educational Psychology Assessments
Emma Kennedy and Isabella Bernardo
Consultation
4. Use of Feeling: a psychoanalytic educational psychologist consultation
Xavier Eloquin
5. What's yours and what's theirs? Understanding projection, transference and countertransference in EP practice.
Gemma Ellis
6. Thinking Matters: What Can Ideas from Bion's (1962) Theory of Thinking Offer to Practising Educational Psychologists?
Kay Richards
Reflective practice & working with groups
7. Relational Model of Supervision
Emma Kennedy, Chris Shaldon, Caoimhe McBay
8. Providing 'Good enough care'
Katie Ellis
9. Reverie groups: space, free association and the recovery of thought
Dale Bartle
Organisational perspectives
10. Social defences in educational organisations
Dale Bartle and Xavier Eloquin
11. Coaching school leaders - a psychoanalytic approach
Beverley Clarke
Afterword
12. The Psyche as a complex system: insights from chaos theory
Christopher Arnold