#34: Making the conscious unconscious, with Peter Blake

I am very excited to release my conversation with Peter Blake on The Secure Start Podcast.

We explore how children communicate through behaviour and play, why containment matters, and how to balance understanding with practical management. We share tools to notice meaning, time conversations well, and use a child’s passions to build safety, trust, and growth.

• why being relaxed and steady allows containment 
• inner and outer worlds shaping behaviour 
• OTT method: observe, think, talk in good time 
• early anxieties, attachment, and security needs 
• unrepressed unconscious and right-brain attunement 
• play as the medium for change 
• joining passions to say “your mind matters” 
• naming thinking without therapy-speak 
• projective identification and holding strong feelings 
• signs therapy can wind down responsibly

Across a warm, grounded conversation, Peter explains how to Observe, Think, and Talk in a way that children can digest, and why the right moment and tone matter more than the perfect words. We dive into early anxieties, attachment security, and the “unrepressed unconscious”—experiences from infancy that live in the body and spill into relationships. You’ll hear practical examples of responding rather than reacting, repairing ruptures, and using ordinary moments to create extraordinary change.

Play takes centre stage as the engine of therapy. From computer games to surfboards and movie obsessions, passions carry emotional truth; joining them says “your mind matters.” 

We also explore endings: how to recognise steadier behaviour, more integrative play, and a more ordinary, balanced bond as signals that therapy can wind down, with other relationships now carrying the holding.

If you’re a parent, teacher, therapist, or carer, you’ll leave with a clearer map: keep boundaries firm, language simple, curiosity open, and focus on creating a felt experience of being known. That’s where change settles in. 

Peter's Bio:

Peter is a Clinical Psychologist and Tavistock trained child and adolescent psychotherapist. For 25 years Peter worked in child and family teams in Community Health Centres in England and Australia. For the last 25 years he has worked in private practice in Sydney. He was the Foundation President of the Child Psychoanalytic Foundation, a charity  based in Sydney.

He is currently Director of the Institute of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy ( ICAPP). This is a training body offering child and adolescent psychotherapy, based in Sydney but offered online. 

He has lectured in a number of Australian Universities and has given workshops to professionals across Australia. The third edition of his book, “Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy: Maaking the Conscious Unconscious” (2021, Routledge), is now useed as a textbook in a number of different countries. It has been translated into Georgian and Mandarin. He has contributed to numerous publications and Journals.

Links:

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheSecureStartPodcast

Podcast Blog Site: https://thesecurestartpodcast.com/
Secure Start Site: https://securestart.com.au/

Disclaimer:

Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce. Further, any advice discussed is general in nature and does not replace clinical advice from a treating clinician. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Scene And Guest Intro
• 3:20 A Career In Child Psychotherapy
• 6:00 Containment And Therapist Confidence
• 7:14 From Insight To Experiencing In Therapy
• 10:24 Keeping An Open, Unsaturated Mind
• 12:55 Inner And Outer Worlds Of Children
• 16:10 Understanding And Management: Two Pillars
• 20:06 Early Anxiety, Attachment And Security
• 24:30 How Inner Worlds Shape Behaviour
• 29:05 Unrepressed Unconscious And The Body
• 34:35 Unconscious Change And Right-Brain Work
• 39:20 Play As The Engine Of Therapy
• 44:05 Join Their Passions: Games, Sport, Music
• 47:20 Naming The Mind And Flipping Worries
• 51:30 Making The Unconscious Work In The Room
• 55:28 Projective Identification In Practice
• 1:00:20 Holding The Work And Self-Care
• 1:03:00 Self-Abandonment And Internal Objects
• 1:06:20 When And How To End Therapy
• 1:10:20 Final Reflections And Thanks

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I think, because I think at a general level, and even if you work with children, a lot of people often don't think, particularly small children, have a mind. If a child does something, you're trying to sort of see what could be in their inner world that may have caused them to do that. 

What you're trying to do as a worker, as a parent, as anyone, is to observe, is to think, and ultimately to talk. More recently, with all the infant research, all the early trauma research, and early relational trauma, there's this whole area of the unrepressed unconscious. That baby doesn't have any capacity to talk about it. 

It doesn't have any capacity to think about it. It can't play something out. Where does it go? What happens to that experience? Beyond services, real therapeutic change happens unconsciously. 

I've spent hours talking about surfing with a kid, and the different boards, the different waxes, the different fins, the different types of waves. That is therapy, and that is giving a sense of conscious to unconscious. I'm trying to deeply know you, and that's the bottom line of all therapy.

Hello, and welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I'm Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is an inspirational leader in Australia's child and adolescent psychotherapy sector. Before I begin the podcast, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands that I come from, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and acknowledge the continuing connection the living Kaurna people feel, as do all Aboriginal people in Australia, to land, waters, culture, and community. 

I'd also like to pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. My guest this episode is Peter Blake. Peter is a clinical psychologist and Tavistock-trained child and adolescent psychotherapist. 

For 25 years, Peter worked in child and family teams in community health centres in England and Australia. For the last 25 years, he has worked in private practice in Sydney. He was the Foundation President of the Child Psychoanalytic Foundation, a charity based in Sydney. 

He is currently Director of the Institute of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. This is a training body offering child and adolescent psychotherapy based in Sydney, but also offered online. Peter has lectured in a number of Australian universities and has given workshops to professionals across Australia. 

The third edition of his book, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, Making the Conscious Unconscious, is now used as a textbook in a number of different countries, and he has also contributed to numerous publications and journals. Welcome, Peter. Thank you. 

Thank you very much. And once again, I stumble a little bit in the reading of the bio, but through the wonders of our new technology, which helps all of us in so many ways, and perhaps it's maligned at times, but it does allow conversations like this to happen and even conversations internationally to happen, and I think that's good. And because I'm recording, I can edit out any particular missteps. 

It's been quite a career. Peter, before we really get into it, is there anything that you'd like to add to your bio? No, I think that's covered it. I think it's quite frightening when I hear it, because I've been doing this for 50 years, and that feels lovely, because it's been an absolute passion, and it's not been a job in that sense. 

And I think probably the last 30 years, it took over 20 years to sort of feel confident enough that I can sort of do this work, and I think I remember when I first started in clinical psych, thinking, oh, in five years, I'll be experienced enough that I'll sort of be more relaxed about this, and I won't have to follow this, this, and this. And that didn't really happen, and I thought, well, maybe it's 10 years, you know. So it's taken a long time to feel relaxed enough, ultimately, just to work the way I work. 

And that's been a combination of the different trainings I've had, the population of people in terms of client populations I've seen, colleagues I've had, certain books or papers that have influenced me. In my London training, you have to have your own analysis, that was five times a week. That's been a mishmash, really, but I think it's a bit sad, because now I'm in my mid-70s, and I feel quite comfortable and confident in what I do. 

And I think for people starting out, hang in there, because I think that it's a really difficult area of work, but if you're passionate about it, and ultimately, that's the thing that's going to be therapeutic, you know, people will get that. I think, yeah, you really, you pick up a point worth making, which is that you've got to feel relaxed in the work that you're doing, especially when you're working with people who are not often enough feeling relaxed within their own bodies. And I think we were talking a little bit before about different kind of concepts and constructs in psychoanalytic work, and mentioned containment. 

And I think in order to be an effective container, and we'll talk a little bit about what that means, I think you need to be very comfortable in what you're doing. And that takes time. And I don't see it necessarily as a linear process, either. 

It has its ups and downs. Certainly, I've been doing it for 30 years. And certainly, there can be times when you're aware of what you don't know. 

Maybe that's one of the things that comes from a long career, that wisdom to know what you don't know. Yeah. I think, and more recently, I think the last 10, 15 years psychoanalysis, or psychodynamic way of working, certainly has changed a long way from cognitive, sort of the boards of cognitive insight and understanding, to much more about trying just to totally be in the experience. 

That's a lot influenced by beyond and post-beyond on writers and authors. And then I think that's been a huge shift for me. Because I think for 25 years, I was desperately trying to understand, and what does this mean, certainly with children and adolescents when they're talking about TV shows or playing? What's the symbolic meaning of all this sort of stuff? And trying to let that go, and really just allow yourself to be.

And I'm just picking up your point about sort of what you don't know. And then there's a lovely concept by a guy called Don Meltzer, a British analyst who no longer with us. But he has a very small paper called Expanding the Diameter of the Circle. 

And in many ways, that captures his idea of just trying to grow more and more. In other words, to not know too much. And in a way, the way I work is trying to pick up Antonino Ferro, an Italian therapist, analyst who works with children and adolescents. 

And he heavily emphasizes the importance of working in an unsaturated way. By that I mean, don't think, oh, I know this, or this is what this means. And you tend to cut it off. 

Where you just stay open and open. You are expanding more and more. And then one of the aims of my work, really, with children and adolescents, is to help facilitate their mind growing, really.

And that's been a big important shift for me. And I think beyond work, which is much more to do with how the mind works, rather than what is in the mind. They're not totally unrelated, of course.

But I think that's been a big shift in the analytic world. It's been a revolution in that sense. So rather than the therapist sitting back there, this means this, or this and this, you're much more relational. 

I think the Americans have helped there in relational, psychodynamic work. So, yes. So, if I can get that across to people that sort of don't feel you have to know it all and be worried if you feel you do know it all.

Yeah. I mean, this was one of the prime motivators for me in starting this podcast, was really to be able to be a resource for early career professionals working in this sector. And to learn from the experience of people who've been doing it a long time. 

Because there is an acquired wisdom. And I think what you're referring to there about being in the experience is very much central to the work that I, the psychotherapeutic work I do with children and young people. So it's, as you say, it's less about what you know about psychoanalytic theory and all the concepts and the constructs, and more about how you create a therapeutic space. 

And the way I think about it is how I am truly here in the moment with the child or young person, and creating a space where they experience themselves in the way that I am wanting them to, that is to achieve certain therapeutic goals or outcomes. I guess that's what I understood I get from you and what you were saying there about changes that have occurred in analytic practice over these last years. I've even, for a long time, I've struggled with the idea of patient. 

I feel like all the child or adolescent are patient. I don't like client. Person is probably the best term you can use. 

So there's that sort of issue really of sort of not, Jessica Benjamin, and again American, the doer and the done to. It's not as if, you know, that medical model of psychoanalysis, where it's a sense of you're analyzing the person as if you put them under the microscope, and you've seen this, and now you're saying, oh, that's what I've seen. So I don't like the word analysis. 

I don't know what else you call it, psycho being. And yet, I think, paradoxically, it is important to have some theoretical conceptual backdrop. So you just don't like, because we're talking about being open, but you're so open it becomes infinite, and that's black hole material. 

It's so wide. And so there needs to be some level of structure and boundaries. There needs to be, I've always said there needs to be an organizing framework in your work. 

And for me, it's always been attachment theory, first and foremost. And so in those moments of being with and mobilizing the relational connection to achieve certain outcomes, what those outcomes are in terms of the, what I understand to be from attachment theory, the inner world of the child, how they are experiencing themselves, how they're experiencing other people, and how they're experiencing their world. And for the population of children, I see a lot of the time that that's not very positive, not in very positive or helpful ways. 

And that comes out in their behavior. But behavior change is a byproduct of therapeutic process. And we're often drawn into expectations of others that we're going to do something about the behavior where we kind of need to do something about the mind, the unconscious or subconscious of the child. 

I'm just wondering, psychoanalytic work very much focuses on the inner workings of the inner emotional world, the inner life of the child. What do you think that people who work with children in related sectors, primarily, what do you think are the things that they need to understand about the inner world of children and young people? I think, because I think at a general level, and if you work with children, a lot of people often don't think, particularly small children, have a mind. They're more or less, when they become about four or five and more verbal and able to say stuff and all this. 

And we now know from the neurological research, from, I think, the psychoanalytic research with infants and doing a lot of infant observation, there's a lot of mindfulness in the very, very, very small baby. So I think a lot of people just don't think about the child's inner world. And as you rightly say, and I can see that the behavior is a combination of a complex interaction of the inner and the outer world. 

The outer world is terribly important, but the inner world is equally important, because it's really how the child perceives and experiences that outer world that we're trying to get to. Another way of putting that is, what are the internal glasses that that child is wearing? So X happens, one child might experience it this way, another child might experience it that way. So I think for people to, another way of doing it is just, and it's easily said and done, but if you're working with small children and adolescents, not, of course, you're going to concentrate on the behavior, you know, that they just hit a little kid or they picked up their bowl of fruit or food and threw it across the room or whatever. 

Ultimately, it's trying to get to what's the meaning behind that? What sort of was going on inside the child's mind that sort of produced that behavior? So there's two things, and I say to parents, when I'm working with parents, that my work is fundamentally built on two pillars. One is understanding, that is, what the child was thinking or experiencing when it did that. So there's understanding, which brings in the analytic, you know, what's the child trying to communicate to you? And then the other pillar is management.

And unfortunately, I think in a lot of my training, there's a lot of emphasis on understanding and reading the play of a child or the talk of an adolescent or whatever, but not enough on what to actually do with that. And I think there's CPT people that can contribute to that. And I think one way or the other is a bit crazy, just to do management. 

And I say to parents, let's say a child wetting their bed badly or something like that, you can read a book that says, this is what you can do. And that's helpful. But that book won't tell you what your little boy or girl is feeling when they're doing that. 

So if you, and with my help, we can sit down and try and think what might be going on in their world, it helps you be a better manager as well. But they're not unrelated, because there's certainly some anxieties or fears or perceptions that need to be sort of sorted out for the management to be much more effective. So I think if you don't get that inner world stuff, I'll branch off quickly. 

I don't know if you've spoken to other people, but my tapestry of training was very inclining. Melanie Klein was one of the earliest people to work with children. And Freud, Melanie Klein are the two big child psycholytic people. 

Anna Freud worked much more with the slightly older kids. She started at around five, six, seven. Klein was very interested in one, two, three-year-olds.

But to cut a long story short, a lot of people will argue Klein is too internal world orientated. And people like, you know, Bowlby and Winnicott, they're trying to get much more of a mix of inner and outer worlds. But Klein, I think, has always helped me think.

Kleinian theory is mainly a theory of anxiety. So if the child is doing something, what are they anxious about? And I say to parents, you give me a child, I'll give you anxieties. That's the nature of the beast. 

We're talking of these anxieties so powerful that they're blocking development. And, you know, they're overwhelming and the child's cutting off or it's bursting out in some sort of terrible behavior. To put it very briefly, Klein takes it further. 

And to some extent, I mean, I also very much bring in more and more attachment. And I think what I love about your podcasts is, you know, the secure start and then the lovely image of the roots of the tree. That's where it all begins. 

So trying to get that inner world as settled as possible, and that brings all the neurological stuff and things like that, in those early two, three, one, two or three is crucial, absolutely crucial. If you can get that secure, then you're building on a much, much stronger base. And clearly, we're not just talking about children, adolescents, these things happen throughout life. 

So when you're 72, there'll still be an inner child and inner world there where you'll have these expectations. And you're still looking at the world through that perspective. The Klein idea is that she takes different levels of anxieties.

And I see this as a bit like attachment or other things, because this is the headline, you know, the child was left or there was a lot of inconsistency in their world. That is the headline. Klein takes it and says, well, let's read the details behind that.

So it's more speculative. That's what a lot of people don't like. It's not as scientific.

But her work with children is sort of saying, in the earliest anxieties you're going to experience, that inner world, and the worst is fragmentation and disintegration. You just feel absolutely chaotic, falling apart, don't know left, right, what's going on. That horrible, you know, falling forever, and there's nothing to grip on to. 

Or adult patients, I'm a cork in the ocean, and it can go any which way, whatever, no anchor at all. That's horrendous. She then talks about, you know, the baby initially needs, and the child needs that security and that binding, that holding, literally, you know, as a small baby. 

You don't wrap up a small baby, they'll go berserk. That needs to be done. And that needs to be done also in terms of predictability. 

All the attachment people say, you know, the secure attachment has to be very predictable, very consistent. So whatever you're working with a child, in any long-term sense, they're the basic things. You've got to be consistent, reliable, predictable, along with being sensitive to what they may be feeling. 

So for me, the headline might be, mother abandoned this child. When that happened, did the child feel they just fell apart? Or, and I use funny language here, she said, the next thing you can go through is a more paranoid, schizoid position. That is that the world is all bombarding, and the child is trying to sort out, these are good experiences, and these are the bad experiences. 

And trying to broadly say, good and bad in the world. And the main anxiety there is that the bad will hurt me. So my mother left because she's a cruel, horrible, terrible mother. 

And that's it. Or it can be that my mother left because there's something wrong with me. I cried too much, or I ran around too much, or I disobeyed too much, or I knocked over things too much. 

She's got a depressive anxiety. So the story is mother leaves, it's because of something like it. Or it can be, the third one, is mother leaves, it's because I wasn't good enough, and my mom wanted to go somewhere else and be with a better kid than with me. 

So you're talking a jealous rivalry, there's three persons, the other, the mother would rather be with that than with me. So that's how I see the inner world, in terms of what, and we all have those, they're not as difficult, how strong is one of those or the other. So an example might be, a kid might come in and pick up a car, and I see there's a little chip on the wheel, and say, I didn't do that, I didn't do that, no, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. 

Whereas another kid might come in and say, oh, you're giving me a chip on the car. You know, it's a very different view of the world. And so if a child does something, you're trying to sort of see what could be in their inner world that may have caused them to do that. 

I have a very close friend who just thinks there is stuff in the world, and the other thing is, if something terrible, trauma happens to them from, you know, from nought to seven, you know, they're 26 now. What are you talking about? So I think that's a worry that you, this whole developmental thing and not, because really adolescence starts in infancy, in that sense. I think what you're referring to is that when behaviour occurs, and it's challenging us in some way, people look for shortcuts. 

And the shortcut is, is there's something that needs, something fundamentally wrong about the child, or wrong with the child that needs to be corrected. And it needs to be corrected through managing that behaviour through the way we respond. And though they may doubt the presence of a mind in a child, the process of engaging in some sort of corrective action, they would be assuming that the child will learn from that. 

And perhaps they also assume that their child will have done some thinking in response to that. And unfortunately, I think what they don't understand is that the child who feels bad, thinks they're bad, and acts bad, when the adult corrects that behaviour, they're like, I knew it. I knew it. 

So what I, that's the thing. And that's the problem. I think we don't, the shortcut there actually perpetuates the problem in many instances, or at least has the potential to do so. 

And I, what I'm hearing you saying is that what we need to do is think about the experience of the child, we need to think about what is going on in their inner world that gives rise to this behaviour. And if we're going to behaviour manage, perhaps the first thing we need to do is respond to that, the what's going on in their inner world, rather than just what would you use, you know, a punishment or in conventional behaviour management terms or star chart or a conditioning or reinforcement schedule. The management, as I understand it, and I'm hoping I'm on the same page as you, is the logical follow on from the understanding of where this behaviour comes from. 

Yeah, picking up a couple of your points, the shortcut, I think, is the carer getting overwhelmed. Got to do something here. And that very much relates to containment, because containment's about when the baby is screaming, what does the earliest caregiver do? Now, if you had a baby, right, and even fathers feel this as well, mothers especially, it gets into you. 

And what do I do? Some mothers can be so overwhelmed, they'll scream at the baby or they'll run up and ruin themselves, it's just overwhelming. So it's trying to contain these very primitive anxieties, falling apartness that the baby is sort of experiencing. So as a worker, I think you've got to try to remain relatively calm when he's just sort of thrown something at you or smashed something or whatever. 

So that idea of reacting. And there's a big thing, I can talk a bit more about this later, but the whole idea you're trying to respond, not to react. Respond brings in the very things you're talking about.

What is this all about? What I talk to parents about is years ago, it was around the time when ADD and ADHD and ODD and all these. And parents were asked about it. So I think this thing called OTT, which is not over the top, I think. 

What you're trying to do as a worker, as a parent, as anyone, is to observe, to think, and ultimately to talk. Can you do that? So one, you've got to, the O is you've observed something. Now, what you've said, something, the child erupted or been really cut off, and you just know that this isn't quite normally what children do or that child does. 

So you've observed that. Something's a bit off here. Then what is going on? What could be behind? What could be their thinking about that, doing that? Now, the reality is, when you observe, and I'm not suggesting if the kid hits his sister or whatever, then there should be, go to your room. 

That's not off. And you're there for five minutes or no TV or whatever the consequence is. There should be a consequence. 

There's got to be a fence around the thing. That is not the time to sort of say, hit your sister. I think you hit your sister because you've been very jealous because she came home and showed that ribbon when she won the race, and you felt, you know, she's getting a lot of attention. 

No. Your upset, their upset, manage it first, you know, but trying to be relatively calm, not in a retaliatory way. When you've cut, you try to think about it later because then you think, what's going on there? And with children, often it can be what I call emotional indigestion. 

So it can appear to be out of the blue, they flare up. But there can be something happened earlier in the day or even an hour before, which may have upset them, but it wasn't, they didn't get an obvious reaction. But then some little thing will happen a bit later, whoosh, so it looks out of the blue.

So I get parents to rewind the day. Have they had a bad day at school? Was there a new teacher at school? Did the sister, or was the sister rushed to hospital or whatever? You know, did anything happen or in the playground or whatever? So trying to rewind that, I think that's what they might have been upset by, that somehow or other they felt left out, let's say it was that. When the child then comes back into the room, you observe, trying to think, the talking is the crucial bit.

You don't then say to the child, look, I had to send you to your room because, you know, it was very unfair what you did to your sister. But I understand that you feel like your sister got a lot of attention when she came home with the gold cup from the swimming carnival or whatever. That is not the time to do it. 

You've got to calm down yourself. And you've got to sort of, when the child's ready to hear it, now I have two adult sons now, they vary. For one of them, I might have had to wait 15 minutes to an hour before I could settle down and think they could hear what I think might have been behind it. 

For the other one, it could be two weeks. So your tone and how you talk about that, how you try to convey your understanding. And I say to parents, even if you can't actually notice what it is, when you've calmed down, even just a general statement that, you know, when you hit your sister, I think you were feeling a lot of upset feelings then.

You don't even tag it to because she won the thing or whatever. And the tone has to be, I'm thinking about this. If you say, you know, when you hit your sister, you've lost it.

Because I know this is another form of teaching and that's a crucial thing. So I also advise parents not to then dwell on it or expect the child or adolescent to reply. You're dropping this in the ocean. 

And you're saying, you know, I think you were really upset when you sort of, you know, through the TV screen, that you must have felt really, really upset. Now, what are we going to have to suffer tonight? You're not because a child, because they feel terrible about that. So as a teacher or a worker, if you can, that broad sort of thing to give to give a very personal, very simple everyday example, and I tend not to like to do that, because it sounds as if I'm this great parent. 

Believe me, I've blown off my chins as well. My son was four years old. His grandmother from South Africa had just visited for a month, had a lovely time with her. 

We had just taken her to the airport. She flew off. We're driving back home. 

There's a park nearby that has a little bike track. He stopped the car. He's going on the bike track. 

He's riding around the bike track. And as he's riding around, he starts crying. And I said, well, here I am, I'm going to tell this to Matthew. 

What's wrong, Matthew? Oh, the sun's in my eyes. And I said, oh, that's awful. The sun's really bright. 

And maybe you're a little bit sad that the granny has just left. And then he walked, and then he kept going on, on his bike. I seem like someone where I told a story, some of the parents I see will say, well, wear a hat. 

I mean, that's an obvious connection. Those parents with a small child crying when that's just gone. But that's all I mean. 

This isn't highfalutin stuff. It's just ordinary stuff, knowing when the time and how to manage it. Yeah. 

You know, there's so much in what you just said there that resonates with me, Peter. And I think about what you're talking about is at the thinking that we do about the experience of our children, or the children that we are responsible for. And that we actually, often enough, we do that. 

There's a particular developmental time where we do that a lot, which is when they can't tell us what's in their mind, what's in their experience. There's a cross-species example of when we do it, which is when we have conversations with our dogs about what we think is in their mind or in their, you know, or our cats or our birds or whatever. We all have a capacity to reflect, or nearly all of us, to think about the experience of another person and put that into words.

If you don't have that capacity, it's probably because you didn't get it as a kid yourself. Really. Some people are drawing from an empty well.

So you need to fill that well too. I mean, yeah. And I think that that's one of the crucial things about what you're talking about, is that if children have experienced significant adversity in their early care environments, then they need this, I call it verbalising understanding, but it's just saying what you think is going on in the head and the heart of the child. 

I call it inner software. Yeah. Inner software that they're going to use for the rest of their life. 

Yeah, yeah. I blew up with my girlfriend and I was furious. I stalled away. 

What the hell's going on with me? That's what it's trying to do. Yeah, sorry. No, no, no. 

I mean, I'm a talker too, but I need to not talk so much when I'm interviewing someone. I think to summarise it, I think we all have to, well, at least nearly all of us have that capacity to hold the child in mind. And that's a really important tool that we have.

Tool. It's a very important aspect of the way in which we approach relationships that supports the child feeling held and in mind and understood and acknowledged and validated and so forth. And really, if you can give them that, that is the most emotional, the greatest emotional gift you can give them throughout life, really. 

Because, you know, when they're teenagers or with all this domestic violence and all things like that, I know it's more than this. But, you know, at one level, when domestic violence and the man hits this woman or does something terrible, something has exploded out. It's not been able to be processed. 

He might swear and slam the door, which we all do. But that's different to it. It just it cannot be contained, processed, thought about. 

Yeah, yeah. I think so it kind of brings me to this notion of unconscious communication and tuning in. I wonder if you'd speak a little bit about you've used those words, I'm sure you've written about them. 

But we're talking really about being sensitive to what the child is putting out, perhaps subconsciously or unconsciously. I do usually use the word unconscious, a subconscious rather than unconscious. But yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah, I think there are lots of different levels. 

The other thing I'll often now use is pre-conscious as well. So there are levels that you've got deep, deep. If you want to go Freudian and leave jargon, I think it's a helpful thing for people to know. 

Because it's only a relatively recent thing that this whole idea, Freud's idea of the unconscious or subconscious is this sort of area where things have been unacceptable and they've been unacceptable. I shouldn't feel this or whatever, and it's pushed down and the lid's put on it and that's what then. And it's called the dynamic unconscious because this is the idea it's trying to break or will break through or needs to break through. 

So more recently with all the infant research, all the early trauma research and that early relational trauma, there's this whole area of the unrepressed unconscious. So these are things that have never ever been conscious. So what happens when a one or 18 months old is sort of abused or abandoned or whatever? Or let's say a nine, eight months old thing. 

That baby doesn't have any capacity to talk about it. It doesn't have any capacity to think about it. It can't play something out. 

Where does it go? What happens to that experience? It's experience. So that really is what we're talking about, an unrepressed unconscious. It's never been conscious. 

It's never had. It was so early on that there was no mind in the infant to be able to process. The argument would be where that goes is it goes into your body, which picks up Freud's first idea. 

The first ego is the body ego. We feel our things through our body. I mean, for many, many years, if I got stressed, I would get rash between my fingers. 

Absolutely. I'm just saying you ought to see my fingernails there. I've always thought of myself as a converter in the old conversion syndrome.

Yeah. But the other way I think it can come out is just sort of really in relational terms, where much later on, you may flare up about some little thing that your partner did, which really is this idea of, let's say you felt abandoned or whatever. I'll give you a personal example of that. 

I was in analysis for five times a week. We had to have that in London. My analyst had just announced, well, it was the last on a Friday, and he was having a two-week Christmas break. 

I consciously thought, great, I can sort of get up early in the morning, and all that. I didn't consciously feel any sense of missing him, or how will I, or whatever. I went back to my girlfriend's place, who is now my wife, and we were doing something, and we're talking. 

She sort of turned away and looked, I think, something out the window, and I just went off. Don't you? Why don't you listen to me? You're always ignoring me. You just disregard what I say. 

She actually said, I'm not your bloody analyst. It's actually just linking a lot of feelings of me just being left, in a sense, not feeling upset at all about it, but at another level that pops out with something that I would have just maintained, but no, she was being very unreasonable, and she wasn't looking at me. Without processing that, eventually I might say, well, stuff you, I'm not going to be your boyfriend, and break the relationship off, because you can't, at times, recover from that horrible feeling. 

Even if you can't get an answer of what it was, you get a sense there was something that was blowing up in me, that there was an overreaction, and I can't really understand why I overreacted, but I do get it was an overreaction. So to answer your sort of sideways question, to answer your question of sort of unconscious to unconscious, I think, and Begon says this, real therapeutic change happens unconsciously. This idea of prefrontal understanding, and all that, I've seen too many people who've had years of therapy, and they're as horrible people as they were when they began, and they can give great insights. 

I give the example of my own analysis, which was really six years, five times a week. I probably could give you four or five insights I got from that, but not much more. But when I look back, before I started that, I used to be an unbelievably fussy eater, and I'm talking sort of late 20s to mid-30s here, and my food was terrible. 

I only had peas, mashed potato, steak, or chicken, and that more than be it. I didn't like any other stuff. I found at the end of analysis, I'm not conscious of it, I really enjoyed all food.

We never talked about that. How did that happen? There are these sort of unconsciously things that are going on. I think what happens in Alan Shore's work, you know, Right Brain to Right Brain, and Neurology, we know that there's all this amazing pre-conscious, subconscious, unconscious, to both parties that are going on.

That's the important stuff, because it's the right brain that carries all the emotional relational stuff in it, and that develops very early. So, there's a lot in there. The things that I was picking up on, well, you mentioned making the conscious unconscious, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the interpretation that I had of that is about making this conscious experience of a relationship, an interaction, a therapeutic therapy, a therapy consultation. 

Making that experience be the subconscious or the unconscious guiding framework, working model, thinking about it from an attachment point of view. This goes back to what I was saying a little bit earlier, that the therapy is about creating a situation, a circumstance, an experience for our clients, but creating an experience for a child that influences the subconscious or the unconscious set of guiding beliefs or ideas and motivations, and Freud would say drives. Am I in the ballpark? You're more than in the ballpark, because I think you've added another meaning to what I put there, and thank you for that, and that's lovely. 

What I meant by it, what you just said makes total sense. I meant by it that I am particularly, and I want to write a second book on this, on play, and I'm meaning children, adolescents, but also adult play as well. Maybe I'll just give you a very simple example. 

A little kid came in and he said, I hate my sister. She gets all the attention, and she gets all the best presents, and they always talk about her. They never talk about me.

It's just not fair. Very articulate, very insightful. He starts playing, and then he gets two lions, no, two tigers. 

He gets two tigers on the table, and these tigers move around, and they start to face each other, and they face each other, and then he just puts them down and goes on to something else. Now, I would be feeling much better if this kid came in and didn't say anything to his sister, and he'd say, a tiger there, and a smaller tiger there, or whatever, and they just start fighting, and one ripping the eyes out of the other one, and biting the skin, and pulling the tail off. Very primitive, emotional, filth things, you know. 

So that, it's in the play, what Beyond would call in the dreaming, in the unconscious element of us, because Beyond turns the unconscious totally around. It's a function of the personality. It's not your topographic theory of, yeah, you've got conscious, pre-conscious, unconscious, not for Beyond. 

It's always there. The way I put my glasses on will be affected by unconscious factors. It is continually, continually influencing us all the time, and so my passion about playing golf, if I'm really passionate about something, then that's carrying a lot of emotional meaning.

That's going to carry a lot of, you know, so really it's in our play, and a child who's fully involved in play, I don't mean it, oh well, the tigers are fighting, but you know, this is passionately, you know, somatically experienced, and it's felt real and alive, not intellectual, things like that. That sort of play is where the therapy happens. So if someone comes into you, and a kid's talking about a computer game, and they're passionate about it, and you get very interested in that, because that's the unconscious factors are going to be influencing it massively. 

Quick example, parents breaking up, bouncing between both parents, he got obsessed with My Fair Lady, I don't know if you know the thing, Eliza Doolittle, and it's an old movie, but he's talked about how unbelievably it was unfair, that this Eliza Doolittle, who lived as a flower girl, and sort of working class stuff, was then taken up to this posh, you know, big posh lady thing, but then they dropped her, and then she didn't belong anywhere. She didn't really belong there, and she couldn't go back to being a flower girl, and he was screaming out to me, this idea, he just didn't feel he belonged anywhere. That, to me, rather than me saying, now the question is, now you're talking about My Fair Lady, I'm wondering if you really feel that between when you bounce around your parents, you feel a bit like that, you don't really belong, I don't do that anymore. 

That's what I was trained to do, and really talking about the unfairness, the rage, the whatever, the not fitting in this of Eliza Doolittle, and the cruelty of these people that did this to her. That's working much more in a projected, unconscious way, and I think that doesn't have to go to the prefrontal cortex and whatever. If the kid then said to me, oh, it's a bit like I feel, fine, that's great. 

They feel that space, and they make the link. I'm not in a rush to make that link anymore. I'm with you on that, and children will often, I'll write things, and children will say, I could have written that, or they'll listen to music, and they'll be really keen on me listening to this music and the lyrics, and I'll say, you could have written that. 

That's as much as I'll say, you could have written that, and that reaction that you get when you know you've hit the nail on the head, so to speak, from the children, just on subconscious. I mean, can I just pick up on that one thing, because I think you're raising an issue I wanted to talk about, particularly with workers, is how do you get into the play, particularly seeing adolescents or older children, because they might just want to talk about their computer games, or the girl wants to talk about Britney Spears or whoever it is, and it may be fast. Usually that's music, movies, computer games, rarely will be subjects at school, things like that, sport. 

That's what their passion, they're really interested in that, that is their unconscious. Be very, very interested. So I say to parents, if your kid goes and plays a computer game, know what computer game it is. 

Sit there, either be a player with them, ask some questions about it, whatever, or if they're going out with mates, know the names of those mates. Know that world, what they like and don't like about them. That's the therapy, really, and that's another way of saying, I'm not just interested in you getting home by 11 o'clock, or you not getting expelled from school, I don't want that to happen, that's if I hate it, but I'm also interested in you and what you're doing. 

If you like needlework, let's say, or surfboard writing, I've spent hours talking about surfing with a kid, and the different boards, the different waxes, the different fins, the different types of waves. That is therapy. And that is giving a sense, a conscious to unconscious, I'm trying to deeply know you. 

And that's the bottom line of all therapy. I agree, and I would particularly make the point, I'm not sure how you explain, because the reality is, you do get, we're paying X amount of dollars for you to work with this child. We're not paying for you to play with them. 

We're not paying for you to pull apart computers and put them back together. That's not what they're here for. We're not, come on, you've got to talk to your therapist about the troubles you're having at school. 

You're not here to play games. And I hear that all the time. I don't always rebut it, but where I can, what I say is, and what was the experience of the child of that interaction? Yeah. 

How does, what do we, and from an attack, you know, we talked a little bit earlier, maybe before we started recording about having a guiding framework. My guiding framework says children who come to see me often enough feel that they are of little value, that they're worthless, that they're inadequate, that they're useless, they can't do things, they're not competent. And that's what lies behind a lot of their behaviour, the behaviours that people are bringing in. 

And I want them to leave every single interaction feeling good enough, competent, loved enough, you know, worthy enough. Every, that, as you say, that is the therapy. Just to jump on that, what you said, I think, and this is not my thing, one of my supervisors, Dan Avalos, emphasises this, and she's worked a lot with autistic and as well as very traumatised and neglected children. 

But can you help me saying something? And let's, just a very quick example, the sort of, a girl was playing with this plasticine and she said that it's so, so smooth. And I was struck by the alliteration and the texture of the sound, but, you know, it was very rich. And this is partly Dan Avalos, who said, that's a very interesting way of describing it. 

Your mind just said, your mind said, so, so smooth, it's like the sound was smooth, and your mind gave us that. Or if you're listening to a kid and they say something that's a bit interesting, or you use a word, just say, that's a very interesting thought you just had. Because Avalos would say, these kids have possibly never had, don't even know they've got a mind, because they've never had a parent or a caregiver that's been interested in their mind, might be interested in their behaviour and all that. 

So just that one, that's very interesting. You're interested in their interesting way of doing it. Your mind, and you can even say, if I say brain, I say mind, your mind gave us that. 

I'm actually splitting them a bit and saying, you and I are looking at you a bit. But that's really, really interesting. The other quick thing that Avalos gave me is that, you know, if you're ever talking about a worry, it's often better to flip it around to a need. 

So the idea, a child is worried about sort of being separated and abandoned, rather than saying, it's really, you get scared that, you know, there'll be no one there. But it's really important for people to be there. Yeah. 

And similarly, they're scared of blowing up, rather than saying you get scared of being so angry. So it's really important. Yeah, it is really important to feel you can stay calm.

You can flip any sort of worry. You're not denying it. You're trying to put it into a more normal need. 

And what you're hearing, what they hear, is not people will be away, but it's for someone to be there. So it's an easier thing that makes it much more hearable. And a lot of my thing is, when you are going to talk, how do you talk about, you know, things that are hearable? And don't speak therapy speak. 

Try to be as authentic and real a person as you can. Therapy speak, you run the risk of losing people that way. And I've always practiced on the basis that you need to keep people engaged. 

I mean, otherwise, you're not able to do anything unless they're engaged. A lot of what we're talking about is what's in the mind of the child or what's in the mind of anyone, really. And the subconscious or unconscious. 

I have a particular way of talking about what it is. Because when people roll their eyes about, you know, like, let's just focus on the behavior at hand, we can see rather than what the child doesn't even know is in their mind, as such. I love your computer example. 

We're not here to put the computer together. You putting the computer bits here or there is a wonderful symbolic example of putting him together or putting your relationship together. And to say, oh, that goes into that hole and that one connected up to that bit. 

That is working, what I was just saying, working unconsciously. You are working unconsciously, making the conscious. You're helping that child dream. 

You're helping them. Dreaming is really allowing your unconscious to sort of be influencing and shaping your conscious and your behavior. It's continually there. 

So I would go to court and if anyone attacked you, saying they're just playing with computers. Because I will say that, you know, if you videotape me, I'm seeing an adolescent, we virtually never talk about the issues at all. It's fashion, it's sport.

Why would they come? Why would they come to talk about those things? And I had never even thought of it as a metaphor, but it is also a metaphor for things that are not working, that they can work again. Metaphor is really important. Yeah, the symbolism of what we're doing. 

And with the unconscious, I say to people, you know, these are the adults that roll their eyes a little bit about this. I say, right at this moment, your brain is aware of the sensation of the sock and that little annoying seam at the end of the sock against your big toe in your shoe. But you're not. 

Yes, but you're not. But after all, yeah, but you will, whether you will adjust your posture, you will adjust the way you walk, you will, your brain, the brain knows what the brain likes. I do use the word brain more than mind. 

And your brain will adjust in consideration of the experience of that big toe. But you won't be aware of it. There's so much. 

We're aware of a fraction of what our brain is picking up on, a small fraction. And that's, so that's the unconscious. And to give a clinical example of that, that boy I was seeing who, when he was about one, mother was in hospital for about a month, had to be fostered for a month. 

And then after a month, mum came out and they started to live together again and whatever. So there was this trauma. It was a month and he was one. 

We're in the therapy, I see these kids five times a week, which is pretty rare these days. And I would see him from seven o'clock in the morning till ten to eight every day. So one day I get there and I see my watch is 20 past seven. 

I say, it's time to finish for today. 30 minutes early. He doesn't blink or anything. 

He goes out. This is a kid who wouldn't, I could never get through to at all, play or whatever. So he goes out and starts to go down the building. 

I go back into the room. I race after him, yell out, come back. It's not part of the finish. 

So he comes back. He doesn't talk about it. I don't talk about it.

Forty years later, I get an email from someone and it's him in another country saying to me, I've got a son 10 years old. I'm worried about him. Can you recommend, is there anyone in this country you could recommend who works like you work with me? Because I found it so helpful.

Now, I consider that case one of my biggest failures. I thought it was a total wipeout. Didn't help him at all. 

I couldn't do it at all. Now, I'm telling this story and it wasn't my insight. It was someone in a group. 

She said, well, isn't that what happened? She said, you just played out when you said unconscious to unconscious. I unconsciously did it. Why did I suddenly, abruptly kick him out very, very early? And that repeating, this history of his, where all of a sudden, there's mommy, mommy's gone. 

And for a one-year-old, a month is forever. But what was different with me is that I recognized and I ran and asked him, said, sorry, sorry, and immediately brought him back. Well, that didn't happen with his mom. 

Totally unconscious to me. And it was like 30 years later, a student had to highlight that to me, that maybe that's why so many years later, he sounded helpful. You just done that little bit of interaction. 

And that could have been so different. So that's a very powerful, hopeful example of unconscious to unconscious, where nothing happened. Otherwise, I can't think, how the hell did I help him? And yet he says, 40 years later, he remembers my name. 

He searches the Googles. Are you the Peter Blake that I saw? You know, it's a pretty, my God. So a lot can happen. 

And so if you feel you've never really helped a kid, don't wipe it off. Because you just don't know. You just don't know. 

And you may never know. That's okay. Yeah, I don't. 

People might say, people might say it comes across as arrogant. But as long as I have been a one good adult, you know, I think the thing about the one good adult research is that you need lots of one good adults, I think, for children. But I think as long as I have facilitated an experience for the child, that they experience themselves as good and capable and competent, that they experience me as being understanding, interested, responsive, trustworthy, then I don't think of anything as being treatment failures. 

And in fact, some of the children, some, I do have the experience at times when other people involved with the children think that it would be better if they take the children to someone else, someone who will, maybe it's a gender thing. It's a gender thing. Maybe it's just that they think my work is primarily with my therapeutic work with children who are under in state care and under guardianship.

So we're talking about carers and social workers and caseworkers. So thinking, oh, you know, maybe we should just take them to someone who will address the behaviour as such. They invariably come back. 

Yeah. They invariably come back because, and I also have that experience of people contacting me years afterwards. But I just want to circle back to something earlier, because you talked about unrepressed experience. 

Most of my work is with children and young people who have experienced abuse and or neglect and they're very early in their life and that unrepressed trauma. Yeah. I wonder if you'd be happy to talk a little bit more about that.

Yeah. Well, the difficulty of that is that sort of talking to them about it was not going to make sense, because in a sense, if it happened early on, it's an early relational trauma, then it's not, you know, there wasn't a memory thing layer to put down, really, and hadn't developed yet. So it's an experience. 

So how do you work with that? The argument would be that for that, okay, this terrible trauma happened, you'd be hoping in the relationship with you, if you know them well enough or whatever, that some acting out of that, something is going to rupture or something's going to happen in the relationship with you. And then you can feel that. You could then say, I wondered if that's what the infant, when you were 18 months old, you know, might have happened.

And now not to think, oh, well, you know, but give it some form, give it some shape. So it can be actually experienced in the relationship, or they may be telling you a blow-up in an outside relationship. Then I think you can say, you know, as I said, I don't know necessarily what would be important is that blow-up of that relationship, that that rupture is repaired, you know, the electronic sort of stuff, that somehow that was, by being exploded out and experienced, that gives it a chance to be processed. 

Whereas if it's just buried there and never, ever, ever, never been pushed down, it's never been known, in a way, can you give it some form? And with an adult, I think I would link it to, we can speculate that, I don't expect you to remember it, because you wouldn't have remembered it. But it just gives some, inverted commas, understanding. But I think that understanding can only come through a limited experience, you know, with the blow-up. 

I mean, the scary part of that, if that person's not in therapy, they may have 20 relationships in their life. When a child has experienced grossly inadequate care, how many unrepressed experiences are they carrying on? How does that come out? Does it come out in transferential behaviour, do you think? The jury's out on that, I think, yeah. I mean, an argument would be, yes, it would, in terms of, you know, you are seeing, let's say you were abandoned or very neglected very early on, but it was so early you had no memory of it, you would think, you know, in terms of transference, that the person is starting, is on the lookout for, you know, are you going to drop them or not? So the other thing that you're relating to is also, because what I think is very important, this is probably getting more into therapy, but when you're doing therapy, what I exclusively think about now, I'm supervising someone, is this, let's say this abandonment thing happened, but it was so, so early, how does that look in the room? Because really talking about it is talking about it.

The only real stuff you've got is actually in that interaction in the room. So let's say the dynamic is abandonment. A few ways to think about it. 

When does this person feel I abandon them, or when do I behave in a way that I do abandon them? So it can go either way, or, and that's the interpersonal, you've also got to look at the intrapersonal. How do they abandon themselves? So they're talking about their girlfriend or something, and she did a terrible thing, and she slept with some other guy or whatever, and this person's telling you this story, and then says, oh, but things like that happen, and I'm sure it'll be okay, and we've had a lovely swim the other day at the beach, da-da-da-da-da. Therein is an intrapsychic abandonment.

There's this pain where his mind went, I can't stay with that, you know, and I would probably know, can we just pause a bit there? It's a bit, again, a beyond thing. Maybe he can experience that pain of being abandoned. Can he suffer it? Suffering is a big thing in beyond things. 

If you've got pain, you've got two options. You can just get rid of it, evacuate it, or you can try to modify it. But in modifying it, you've got to, to some degree, stay with it. 

Now, he could have stayed with it by just talking about watching a movie where there was this terrible, painful thing, theme of abandonment or jealousy or whatever. That would be staying with it. I don't mean necessarily just talk about it, but his unconscious would be still dreaming it. 

He'd be still processing it in some sort of way. So transits and catatransits, I think, to think about it, if the dynamic is X, whatever X is, losing control of themselves, abandonment, jealousy, falling apartness, I'm trying to think, okay, do I feel I fall apart? Do I make them feel they see me as falling apart? How they fall apart inside there? I'm bringing it all. And ultimately, the cycle, and you can this is an argument, particularly with children, you can be too pure, and I can be too pure. 

I'm keeping it really in the room, because I don't sort of say, and you know, what did mum and dad have to do? I said, when I was an early adolescent, and she would say, oh, my parents did this and da da da. And then she says, well, could you talk to your parents about, you know, what you could say? And I think, no, no, no, it's taking it out of the room. It's in the room. 

An analytic, conceptual theory can really only change, in a sense, what's what's immediately in there, in the room. Now, I know, if you're talking about workers that are sort of, you know, not in the room in that one sense, but if they're having a relationship with someone, and they see this kid is very quickly, and he's very sensitive to being clearly pushed aside, then, you know, one, to be aware of that, two, could he behave in a way as to make you, and this brings in particular identification, that he does something where suddenly you've found yourself, you are pushing him aside. Because that's the problem with the dynamic.

If you feel pushed aside, there's a danger, you're going to live a lot of your life, where you may bring out that dynamic in that you'll behave in a way as to make other people feel pushed aside. Yeah, yeah. And the pain's in them, not in you. 

That's what objective identification means, that this thing that identifies as pain, I project it, and I put it into the other, and the other actually feels it. The other actually feels pushed aside. That's different to projection. 

Projection, to me, is they are seeing me as me pushing them aside, and I'm not. Whereas, you know, if they're doing something, and that generates in me, that I behave in a way as to push them aside, that is projective identification. That's a big difference between what's called projection and projective identification. 

So a quick, very quick example, little nine-year-olds, or very first seconds you walked into the room, you picked up a cushion, you're cornered, and you say, don't kill me with your piss, don't kill me with your piss. What a psychotic. That would be, he was seeing me as someone who's going to hurt him. 

That would be projection. A little girl, she used to come in and say, hello, Mr. Blake. It's just really crazy. 

She dumped things off the shelf. She had some chalk, knock it off the little layer there, and accidentally squash it as she walked. I am wanting to kill her. 

I'm just furious at her. That could be seen, because she had a lot of early terrible trauma, that this rage, this murderousness, in a sense, she's dealing with by her behavior. I don't think she's consciously thinking this out. 

She's just doing these things, but it generates in me this murderousness, and I am actually feeling it. I've been going to try to recover from that and process it and think about it, not actually hit her or whatever the thing is. If you're working with kids who have had a lot of trauma, it's an occupational hazard, because if they're felt abandoned, they may make you feel very abandoned or useless or pathetic.

You may have to carry that and not retaliate back and say, I've been asked to hold a horrible feeling that they just haven't been able to hold or it's never been processed. And that's the difficulty of the work, isn't it? That we do have to hold, we hold so much for our children. You must have colleagues, you must do exercise, be there with music. 

After 40 years, I had a sudden heart attack with no apparent reasons for having it, and I think that's because I got really busy. I'd normally run and swim a lot. In working and privately, you're very alone. 

You don't have both clients you can just spill over to and hold you and contain you after that. So that's been put into you. You need something or someone, because otherwise you'll burn out. 

Yeah, that's something that is close. But we could talk for ages. There's a couple of things that I'd like to ask you about before we wrap up. 

You said something in there about abandonment, and it got me thinking about the children who abandon themselves. Because I think that there is, within the children, within their subconscious, there's a set of organizing beliefs that are essentially negative. But there are also positive ones as well. 

And part of our job is to increase the strength and influence of those more positive organizing beliefs. It's not part of it, that's our job. I see children abandon that. 

And in doing so, they abandon that part of themselves that is lovable, capable, deserving. And now they engage in a range of problematic behaviors, whether they're problematic relational behaviors, substance issues, self-harm, and the like. My question is, when you referred earlier to abandoning themselves, that's how I put it into the context of my work. 

What are your thoughts about that? I can Kleineanize that easily. You're talking about organizing frameworks, which I think is a much more functional, I think probably more helpful way of thinking about it. Kleine, because you work with little kids, these little kids would have little internal objects, you know, there'd be a good daddy and a bad daddy, or a sad mummy and a happy mummy. 

And this world is populated, they're mind-populated, but it's called object relations theory. But that idea, yes, that there is no, and the Americans talk about it, there is no concept of a self. There are many, many, many selves, when you think about it that way. 

And there is this, if they have introjected, i.e. identified with a parent or caregiver that was abandoning or was teasing or humiliating them a lot, that sort of goes in and becomes a bad internal object in a way. So, you know, I had a woman therapist for many years who couldn't cross the Sydney Harbour Bridge, she would just panic. So she eventually did it, you know, and then she says to me, and this was a common theme, you know, oh, but that's pathetic. 

You know, what's the big deal? I crossed the Harbour, people do that a million times a day without even thinking about it. This was, like you were saying, it's really, this good thing had happened, and she widened it, which is your calling abandoning or undermining. There's something and I think to highlight that, that's a very beyond way of thinking about it, what you're saying is really how her mind or this child's mind works. 

And, you know, that really reminded them that they say, look what you say, what did, they just did this great thing or whatever, and it's like, you know, there's this part of you that abandons you, and that's not fair. And, you know, we have to get onto this abandoning bit of you or this bit of doing that, and doesn't keep reminding you that you can do these good things. So this, I'm kind of leading into my final question with you, which is, when do you know it's time to wind things up? Welcome to this unbelievably horrible and wonderful world of working with mental health with children. 

Children and those who've got this horrible plus wonderful developmental push, and ultimately you're trying to work where you feel development is somehow, I don't know how to describe this to Perry, are we talking about a little hiccup here, or are we talking about a serious block? Because there's going to be regressions and things like that, you know, so how do you know? And, you know, you can stop with a kid and, you know, sort of the thing is terrible, and they do really well because other things have come into their life and all that. But the simple, in a therapy situation, I'm looking at a few factors. How do you know when to finish? One, what is the outside world telling me? That he's not taking drugs, he's not doing terrible things in relationships, all the pretending sort of problems. 

Have they really improved and they've stayed pretty improved for a while? Two, if it's children, I look at the material in their play. They are telling me via their play. In other words, are we always getting wars and fights, or are we increasingly seeing ambulance and police come into the thing, or Lego blocks that sort of do get finalized and are formed into a proper, whatever shape they wanted to make it? So you're getting more positive themes coming into the actual play itself. 

I'm looking at the outside world. In other words, if you're talking to an adolescent, they're telling you movies or computer games where there are more benign figures, or things have been resolved, or things like that. So I'm looking for that unconscious and conscious communication from them that I'm feeling a bit more held together. 

And then the final thing I would look for is the transference. That is, are they actually relating to me? Not as this idealized, wonderful, perfect, always there, or terrible, you don't give a shit about me. It feels fairly normal.

Then they would be, that's my broad criteria for ending. And at the end of it, I'm like this. There is no way in the world, you know, you can predict, this thing cannot predict, and we don't know what's going on. 

To give you a very dramatic example, I don't know if it's legal to say it, but Anavara, she's to all these very, very deprived people. If the caretakers wanted to pull them out of therapy, she would say, you know, well, I think if you're pulling them out of therapy, there's a risk that you'll end up on a park bench. I mean, that's really fighting and standing up for it. 

A professional can't say that. We certainly would perish, intensely guilty. But I think there are times when you say, if this stops, I have extremely high, very high concerns about his future or her future mental health.

I always say the goal of therapy is redundancy. You know when to stop. When what you're offering is being offered or can be offered from other adults in their life, outside of therapy. 

Yeah. I mean, the thing I'm adding to that really is from an unconscious psychological point of view. Can you read unconscious communications as well? You may be getting that consciously, but the story they're telling you, you know, and reading this book about someone abandoning and dah, dah, dah or whatever. 

Not so sure, you know, so it's talking about the outside and the inside, that perspective. It's got to come back to the beginning, inner and outer. Look, as you know, I've got notes here. 

I could ask many more questions, but I think, yeah, we've both got days to get on with. So I think we'll wrap it up here. But thank you.

Thank you, Peter. That was really an inspiring conversation. Well, thank you. 

I mean, you've added a couple of more. You've widened my diameter a bit on the way you framed the conscious-unconscious stuff for me. So thank you. 

It's not one way at all. Yeah, thank you. I'm pleased to know that. 

Okay. Thanks, Colby.