The ‘hostile environment’ and the therapeutic journey of an adolescent girl*

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper is drawn from doctoral research investigating whether cross-cultural psychoanalytic psychotherapy and the transference relationship can be helpful in the development of the self of an adolescent BAME patient. I will refer to some of the findings from the doctoral research and from the material in the patient’s three-and-a-half years intensive psychotherapy, to show how her ideas of self, ‘other’, gender and sexuality were affected, in a particular way, by her experience of inhabiting family, social and political environments she experienced as hostile. This paper will describe how child psychotherapy can be crucial in supporting adolescents negotiate their identity, when the environments they inhabit act to impede this. I will pay particular attention to how the transference and countertransference can be used to understand and tend to the patient’s ideas of self and other that have been informed by the post-colonial beliefs embedded in the environments they inhabit.