This book is about children in State care and its title – Waiting to be Found – is derived from an observation about such children by the child psychotherapist Hamish Canham. In one of his early papers Canham wrote that children’s homes often reminded him of "station waiting rooms with children waiting to move on to their next placement and staff waiting for the next shift, or working as a residential social worker in order to get experience before moving on to do something else or further training.” This book takes his comment about waiting rooms as its starting point, with each contributor building upon its central implications. The contributors to this book each explore the importance of relationship; whether between child and care system, child and clinician or other practitioner, practitioners with practitioners, or individuals with the organization in which they work. Overall they demonstrate when attention is paid to any one of these relationships this determines emotional-psycho-social success for the child, and how when this attention is missing serious issues arise. As a snapshot view of the way Canham’s focus is used today, they show that he was ahead of his time in thinking about the structure and function of what we now recognize as the corporate parent. Table of Contents:
Series edi tor’s preface
Acknowledgements
About the edi tor and contributors
Preface
Foreword Introduction
Part I: Canham: writer and clinical thinker
1 Focusing on the relationship with the child, Andrew Briggs Selected papers by Hamish Canham
2 Growing up in residential care [1998]
3 The development of the concept of time in fostered and adopted children [1999]
4 Exporting the Tavistock model to social services: clinical consultative and teaching aspects [2000]
5 Group and gang states of mind [2002]
6 The relevance of the Oedipus myth to fostered and adopted children [2003]
7 Spitting, kicking and stripping: technical difficulties encountered in the treatment of deprived children [2004] Part II: Working with children in care
8 The expressed wishes and feelings of children, Biddy Youell
9 Innate possibilities: experiences of hope in child psychotherapy, Simon Cregeen
10 The riddle of the Sphinx, Jenny Sprince
11 Neglect and its effects: understandings from developmental science and the therapist’s countertransference, Graham Music
12 Creating a “third position” to explore oedipal dynamics in the task and organization of a therapeutic school, John Diamond
13 Facing reality: Oedipus and the organization, Deirdre Moylan
14 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? Louise Emanuel
15 Physical control, strip searching, and segregation: observations on the deaths of children in custody, Deborah Coles & Helen Shaw
16 Observation, containment, countertransference: the contribution of psychoanalytic thinking to contemporary relationship-based social work practice, Stephen Briggs Endpiece
Publications by Hamish Canham
References
Index About the Author: Andrew Briggs is Head of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy in Kent and Medway NHS partnership Trust. He is also Clinical Lead for a mental health service for children in care hosted by this Trust and commissioned by Kent County Council. His previous publications include a festschrift for Esther Bick, Surviving Space: Papers on Infant Observation (2002) and papers in various journals on topics including observation in clinical practice, a consultation to a children’s home, and the role of masculinity in psychotherapy with an under-five boy. | 
