BPA Scientific Meeting

Saturday 14^th November 2026
11am – 1pm

Starting out in Life….Again

Becky Hall

This paper draws on the contribution of psychoanalytic thinking about children to our understanding of the beginnings of psychological life, work with parents, carers, adopters, and the treatment of very deprived children. It describes work with an experienced foster carer, undertaken in a specialist NHS LAC CAMHS which is co-located with Local Authority Children’s services. Ordinarily committed to short periods of emergency fostering, this ‘baby-carer’ puts herself into the immediate vicinity of acute states of infantile pain and distress within a context and timeframe that function to protect her own mental state. Temporarily she enters the necessary state of mind of a primarily preoccupied mother, supported in the knowledge that the situation is held by the third, background presence of the Local Authority who will support her adult capacities and separate the dyad within the agreed period.  It makes use of a series of consultations in which the therapist must quickly feel her way into the state of mind of a deeply traumatised young child whose adoption has broken down. The efforts to work together with the child and her fostering ‘baby  carer’, and the traumatised child revived in the foster carer by the therapeutic work, result in new possibilities for both as they each start out in life, again.

The paper hopes to be of interest to all who work with children, adults and traumatised patients across the life cycle.

Becky Hall qualified as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist from the Tavistock Clinic in 2009 and subsequently trained as a Psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytic Association (BPA). She has worked extensively in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and has a particular interest in fostering, adoption and parental mental health. Alongside her NHS work she has a private clinical practice, supervises, writes, and teaches. She is an ACP registered Training Analyst and a Trustee of the Stuart Hall Foundation through which she co-ordinates support for disadvantaged students hoping to train as Child Psychotherapists at the Tavistock Clinic.

The opinions and views expressed are entirely those of the speaker in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the policies or opinions of the BPA.