Gianna Polacco Williams: Legacy Interview - how even the most deprived and traumatised children can be helped

MINDinMIND

Welcome to the launch interview of MINDinMIND where the world’s leading clinicians working in child mental health share their ideas about what best helps children and families. This is the first online platform to curate and centralise high-quality interviews of leading practitioners to bring the most important thinking to current and future professionals working with children and families.

Our debut interview is with one of the most respected and incisive clinicians in child mental health today, Gianna Polacco Williams, who has done much to help our understanding of internal defences and eating disorders in particular. She is a Consultant Child Psychotherapist and Psychoanalyst. Her paper 'Doubly Deprived' https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00754179708257300?journalCode=rjcp20 (Henry, 1974), written as Gianna Henry, broke new ground. It became an instant classic and is still one of the most quoted papers in child psychotherapy. The significance of Gianna's contribution can not be over-estimated. It sparked research into psychotherapy with traumatised children, pioneered at the Tavistock Clinic by Mary Boston and others (Boston and Szur, 1990). Before it was published there was a widely held belief that severely deprived children could not be helped with psychotherapy.

In this interview she talks about Martin, the 14 years old patient who was the source of her ideas, and why the concepts she wrote about then are as relevant today.

The concept of Double Deprivation suggests that the first deprivation is that which has been caused by a child’s external circumstances which cannot be changed. The second deprivation is due to a child’s internal defences which have developed in the avoidance of psychic pain and the nature of the child’s internal objects, which with treatment can be modified and so is changeable.

Gianna also discusses in depth one of her other key theoretical ideas, the ‘No Entry’ defence, an illuminating concept in understanding the development of some eating disorders.

Gianna has worked all over the world, including the Tavistock Clinic for over 50 years (2020) where she led the child psychotherapy discipline in the Adolescent Department. She has been instrumental in establishing child psychotherapy trainings in her native country, Italy.

Gianna became a member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists in 1966, and worked at the Child Guidance Training Centre, Tavistock Centre from 1968-70. She has been working at the Tavistock Clinic from 1970 to the present day.

Each week we are adding more interviews and research from leading thinkers and innovators sharing what their experience has taught them about children's minds and psychological issues such as anxiety, trauma and depression and how families can cope with these times of extreme challenge. Now more than ever, all of us working with children need the wisest minds to guide us. Everyone featured here have spent their clinical lives honing their understanding of child and family life.

GO TO WWW.mindinmind.org.uk FOR FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY AND WRITTEN OUTLINE OF INTERVIEW