Time and memory in the therapeutic journey with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children

This is a discussion of psychodynamic psychotherapy with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service setting. The clients discussed present with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The paper draws on cultural concepts of trauma and distress and psychoanalytic theories of trauma. It explores how the self experiences an overwhelming experience of fear, as a frozen moment in time, which cannot be mentalized and may be expressed in a compulsive repetition of the moment, in bodily states, and in dissociative states of mind. The paper considers a therapeutic approach based on the therapeutic relationship and the therapist's capacity to witness the traumatic event alongside the client. This approach, it is argued, enables the client to begin to mentalize the traumatic event and to begin to mourn their experience. The client can thus become able to recover some of the memories and sense of identity which had been fragmented and temporarily lost, as a result of the traumatic event.