Working psychotherapeutically with children and adolescents who resort to violence.

SATURDAY MORNING WORKSHOP

17^TH May 2008

In this workshop Marianne will consider the normative development of aggression and the roots of violence, how and why adolescents may use violence to shape their identity and how a psychoanalytic perspective can help us to work usefully with violent children and adolescents. The following questions will be addressed: Is there a difference between violence and aggression? Why might someone act violently? Are there developmental factors that set a young person on the road to violence? Are there dangers signs or triggers that we can be alert to? How can we work with youngsters who are violent? These questions will be illustrated with three clinical examples.

Marianne Parsons has worked as a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Portman Clinic in London for the last 19 years where she was a member of the Violence Research Project under the leadership of Dr Mervin Glasser. The Portman Clinic is an NHS outpatient clinic for children, adolescents and adults who suffer from perversion, violence and delinquency. It offers assessment and treatment based on a psychoanalytic perspective. Marianne Parsons is also a child analyst and an adult psychoanalyst (trained at the British Psychoanalytical Society) with a private practice. She was the Head of Clinical Training for child and adolescent psychotherapists at the Anna Freud Centre and the editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy and she teaches widely in the UK and abroad.

This workshop should be of interest to health care professionals, therapists, counselors and others working with children and adolescents.  

Notes from this workshop can be found below: