Working with More Disturbed Clients

Abstract

There have been a number of references so far in this book to clients who are clearly more disturbed in the sense that their functioning in the everyday world is impaired (e.g. Ronald Britton’s patient in Chapter 1 who would try obsessively to flush her ‘bad’ thoughts down the toilet) or who are clearly psychiatrically ill (Rosenfeld’s schizophrenic patient in Chapter 6). The theoretical chapters have given us the conceptual tools in order to understand such clients, in particular a description of the paranoid-schizoid position. We can now, in this chapter, present a more coherent picture of this mode of experience and the particular demands working with such clients make on the counsellor.