When Love Is Not Enough

The Management of Covert Dynamics in Organizations That Treat Children and Adolescents

When Love Is Not Enough relates how a multitude of factors--the competence of staff; the safety, nurturing, and protective elements of the emotional, physical, and political setting; and all overt and covert organizational dynamics--determine whether or not a treatment setting accomplishes its therapeutic aims. Authors in When Love Is Not Enough continue the emphasis on the group-as-a-whole “Group Relation” model of organizational and group processes begun with Wilfred Bion’s work at the Tavistok Clinic in London in the 1940s. This model helps those providing services to children and adolescents evaluate their treatment programs and make the necessary changes toward improvement.

Chapters in When Love Is Not Enough are dedicated to improving the psychological treatment of children and adolescents in postmodern society, a society in which life in interdependent communities is becoming increasingly important for the health and survival of all persons. Topics covered include:

• the Tavistok approach to understanding group and organizational behavior

• the emphasis on group-as-a-whole in problem solving and treatment design

• narrowing the gap between plan and outcome

• the dynamics involved in the psychiatric treatment of children

• issues of staff selection, training, and development in programs designed to treat children

• countertransference responses in the treatment of children and adolescents

• revitalizing organizations

• the subjective experience of school life

  When Love Is Not Enough helps organizations realize the ways in which they may, inadvertently, undermine the emotional and cognitive functioning of the staff or the identified patients and set serious limits on the growth of members of the organization, staff and patients alike. It urges organizations to conduct an ongoing self-scrutiny concerning their rational and irrational processes, as this self-examination is crucial to the health and vitality of the treatment offered to others. The book also promotes thinking of the conscious and unconscious dynamics of the group-as-a-whole to more completely inform organizational decisions concerning changes that may enhance the treatment of children and adolescents.

  When Love Is Not Enough serves as an invaluable guide for mental health professionals who treat children and adolescents, group therapists, hospital and clinic administrators, psychoanalysts, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists.