Untying the Knot: Working with Children and Parents

Untying The Knot sets out to present a clinical approach to cases where the referred patient is a child or adolescent, but in which the parents are intimately involved in the therapeutic situation.

Three fundamental principles inform the work: firstly, that early experience influences present lives; secondly, that unconscious feelings and fantasies are elements which shape everyday conscious experience; and thirdly, that the interaction of children and parents leads to patterns which become self-perpetuating and make it virtually impossible to define what is cause and what is effect in their relationship.

Dr Brafman acknowledges the pioneering work of Donald Winnicott in the treatment of children, emphasizing particularly his refusal to be bound by rigid notions of treatment modalities, but instead to go to the heart of the matter - an understanding of the child's own confusion and pain, and then, through its elucidation and expression, to bring relief.