Abstract
Mental health practitioners recognize that a sense of belonging is, as discussed in the Introduction, critical to humans attaining and maintaining a sense of emotional well-being and good mental health (Anant, 1966). The title of this book—Towards Belonging—is intended to convey belonging as a state of being that is achieved through the development of a relationship. The ideas and questions raised in this chapter derive from the referrals of children in care or adopted whom I have seen for psychotherapy when working in CAMHS. The common experience for most of these children and young people is removal from their birth parents and placement with families who are strangers. This stark fact of movement has a huge emotional consequence, as the child is separated from the family he belongs to biologically and is placed with people for whom this link will never exist. Theoretically, this dramatic transition raises many important issues as far as a child’s development is concerned. For attachment theorists, and especially those with a focus on neuroscience, the broken link with the primary caregiver represents an opportunity for a very serious disruption in neuro-developmental terms, leading to difficulties with attachment to new caregivers. For some, however, due to the primary caregiver’s own difficulties, the link was already broken 20before the child’s removal. For psychoanalytic thinkers, one consequence of this broken link is the opportunity for the development of severely unwell states of mind. This is due to the breaking of the container–contained relationship. For some children, a prior breakdown in this relationship does not bode well for this containment by a new relationship.