What is work?
Contents
Chapter 1 (cont.)
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Introduction
This month, we’re taking a bit of a step back from our focus on maternal leadership – although not completely. Like last month, when the non-problem was the thing to be taken seriously, this month, the way of maternal leadership emerges through non-action.
When I wrote the following two pieces of fiction, my focus was how others m/other: teachers, social workers, extended family, librarians, office workers - those who aren't biologically mothers but take on m/othering roles in their professional lives.
I was also thinking about the idea of the ‘bad other’ (yes, that’s a typo, but I’ve decided to keep it – it sheds an interesting light on things). Unless we explore what a ‘bad mother’ – or ‘bad other’ – might be, how can we possibly work out how to care for or engage with them? Whether that’s in a practical way through our work, in generating theory, or in the internal reflection we do as Theraplayers.
And since the baddest mother I know is myself (when I’m mothering myself), this raises real questions about how we sustain our capacity to care. There's something inherently conflicted in tending to others while berating oneself. Can poor self-m/othering really support good m/othering of others?
I find myself asking: what makes a m/other ‘bad’ in the eyes of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy?
Maternal leadership is built on being led by a m/other tongue, and the nature of that tongue influences how we mother – how we care for (actively, not just passively caring about).
So many questions, so few answers – but, hopefully, some helpful illumination that takes us a step further in thinking about how we operationalise our m/other tongue.
15:40: Tense stand-off
The room was definitely filling up. The noise levels were rising. Her body registered it as a threat, even though her head knew it wasn’t one. She’d always known she reacted this way, but labelled it as weirdness, stupidity, failure. Everyone else coped just fine. It was just her who couldn’t manage.
It was Graham, with his vet’s understanding of animal behaviour, who had moved that knowledge from her body to her mind.
“You’re like a horse in a busy field, ready to protect yourself,” he’d said once. She’d initially taken offence, and he’d been mortified. For him, animals’ ability to protect themselves and survive was an endless fascination, and to recognise that was a deep professional skill, not a dismissive insult.
It had taken a little time to unravel the roots of the frostiness between them. “I’m not a horse!” she’d huffed, stung that he hadn’t seen the cat in her.
Val had always been accused of earwigging, of being sneaky – a child listening in on conversations she wasn’t meant to hear. It had always left her injured. Like the accusation in the car that she really didn’t need to wee as they’d just left home, she had always felt she had to take on the adult interpretation of her behaviour. After all, she was sneaky, stupid, weird. A failure.
But to her, it wasn’t intentional slyness. It felt more like certain conversations suddenly came into sharp focus, while everything else around them faded – as if the most important voices had the volume turned up, and all the rest turned down.
Her professional self knew that children did this when they had to keep themselves safe – tuning in to where the danger was. But until Graham made his comment, she’d never realised why she understood that experience so well. She hadn’t learnt it in her professional training – she’d lived it as a child.
It was happening now – the long-distance tune-in to the most important conversation.
One of the gangly, not-yet-grown-into-his-feet boys she’d clocked earlier - the one who was with his dad - was staring intently at the food in front of him, not eating, his face expressionless. They’d been joined by a woman. The man and woman leaned towards each other, their bodies sharp with tension. Her eyebrows were thin and arched, her skin flawless.
“You should have been here half an hour ago,” the man was saying. He rattled his key fob as if to say: look, I need to go.
The woman matched his intensity. “There was traffic. It’s busy out there. You could have brought him back yesterday.” Val picked up the slow, careful pace, the too strongly held eye contact, the barely-breathingness.
He pulled up his sleeve as if to look at his watch but barely glanced. Val had the strong sense he was trying to make an impression. The watch was chunky, gold-looking. She wouldn’t know brands, but if forced to express an opinion, she’d bet it was expensive.
“You just wanted to cut my contact short. He didn’t want to go to some stupid Halloween party. He’s not a kid anymore.” The words spat out, but he wasn’t really looking at anyone.
“Did you ask him?” the mother said, not really interested in the answer. She used words like a knife to prod and provoke.
The man stood abruptly. Not violently, but with force. He didn’t say goodbye to his son. Just turned and walked off without looking back, heading for the footbridge over the motorway.
The woman deflated. She placed a hand on her son’s, but he didn’t react.
“Finish your food and we’ll go,” she said.
The young man sat in stony stillness, now unable to touch the food in front of him. His mother kept her hand on his. She’s waiting for him to come back, Val thought. This isn’t new. They’ve been here before. She wondered how long it usually took – how long until the freeze subsided, until they could breathe again, move, speak.
“Blimey!” Graham said, pulling her back to their space. “Look at that!”
Outside the window, the slate-grey sky was collapsing in sheets of solid rain. Within moments, the motorway surface turned slick and gleamed with headlights as drivers flicked them on, trying to cut through the thick curtain of water.
15:45 Waiting
The food had failed to satisfy, despite the double order of veggie burger. It left a greasy feeling on her fingertips and a nagging desire for more. She checked her phone again: 15.45.
Still nothing from the breakdown people.
A message from Joe: On my way back, call you tomorrow.
She could access a few emails, but she didn’t want to reply on her phone. There was just so much less space on a phone to be expansive in reply to people. The tight space of the screen and lack of manual dexterity in fingers wired for typewriters meant her responses ended up brief and more cryptic than she intended. She’d managed to turn off predictive text after it started mangling everything beyond sense – now she had no idea how to turn it back on.
It was moments like this when she missed work – not the job itself, but the people. Especially the younger ones, who’d laugh with her and her technological misinterpretations, and kindly help her navigate the essential stuff. If she was honest, she’d started playing up her age in the end. She could have got the hang of things with a bit more time and effort, but it became a point of connection – a bridge to her younger colleagues and some of the brilliant teenagers she’d worked with. Surely it counted as a reasonable adjustment, being offered a bit of extra support given her age?
At school, there’d been maybe two BBC Micros pupils could use – and the boys hogged them. She remembered learning to type on a manual typewriter. Her portable had once been her pride and joy, then electric typewriters became things of wonder. Now she had a whole computer in the palm of her hand. Her brain couldn’t get around that. Her inner world construct found it difficult to accommodate.
She flicked through news websites to pass the time, did a crossword, half-read a book – but the phone felt too small to contain the whole of a book, to give it weight or meaning.
A strange pang hit her – a longing she didn’t expect. She wished she had a son or daughter to roll their eyes and say, “Oh, Mum,” then help her out. She sighed. Really, she was just bored.
She leaned back in her seat, glancing around. Graham was still absorbed in his book. He’d thought to bring his tablet – the screen was bigger so it was easier to read, or maybe he just didn’t get tangled up inside the technology like she did. Maybe screen size didn’t matter to him. Maybe, for him, the information never felt too big for the device.
She looked around again, hoping for something, hoping to find meaning. The place seemed even fuller now. People peeled off dripping coats and hung them over the backs of chairs as they sat to eat.
The family with the other teenage boy - the one with the little sister, the mother, and the grandmother - got up to leave.
“That rain’s really heavy out there,” the grandmother said. “Do you think we’ll be alright?”
The mother’s forehead puckered, her lips tightening slightly. “It’s just rain, Mum. I know how to drive in the wet.”
The children stepped closer together. The boy reached for his little sister’s hand – no fuss, no performance. It looked familiar. She tilted her face up to him, and he scowled down at her. But she just smiled. It wasn’t an angry scowl – it was a kind of unspoken code between big brother and little sister: I love you, I’ll protect you, but don’t let anyone know – that’s just not cool.
The grandmother huffed as she picked up her coat and bag, checking the children had all their things.
“Sorry, Mum,” the woman said, her voice softening. Val saw her lips loosen, chin drop, a hand rub across her forehead. “I really appreciate you being here. I don’t know what I’d do without you while Dave’s in hospital. I’m just a bit frazzled.”
The grandmother placed a hand on her daughter’s arm but didn’t look at her. Maybe it would take a little while for the sharpness of the interchange to dissipate and for her to feel able to appreciate her daughter’s apology.
Val blinked and tried to look away. She didn’t want to seem like she was prying – but families always fascinated her. The way they worked things out, or didn’t. Her mind started piecing together a possible story: the dad in hospital, the mum juggling too much, needing help not just with the children but with her own emotions. She needed her mother – but being a mother and being mothered at the same time was complicated. The push and pull of it, the tension and care tangled together. It all seemed to rattle up and down the generations, rising to the surface when life cracked the routines – revealing where the real strength held fast under pressure.
Val let her eyes drift casually back towards the children, curious to see how it played out further down the chain. The boy was still close to his sister. She watched as their hands went up and down – one, two, three – then rock, or paper, or scissors. He nudged her gently when she beat him, then puffed up with pride when he won.
The mum walked over to them, placing a hand on each child – one on the girl’s head, one on the boy’s back. They both moved towards her, slipping their arms around her. They were too far now for Val to hear what might have been said. The girl turned fully into her mum’s embrace, wrapping both arms around her. The mum stroked her hair gently. The boy let go first, stepping away and heading back towards his grandmother.
Val watched him, and saw all his ages at once – the big brother steadying his little sister, the adolescent outgrowing his mother but still falling into her embrace, and now, gangly boy-turned-young-man, slouching towards his grandmother, trying not to knock chairs with his feet, dropping his shoulders and head to soften his height.
Val didn’t see his lips move, nor hear any words from him or his grandmother, but suddenly he had her bags in his hands while she straightened the chairs at the table and picked up the wrappers and cups, disposing of them in the bins. The young man led the way, weaving between the tables, people, and damp coats like an explorer in this new territory of adulthood leading his elders back to their tribe.
Val couldn’t help but keep watching, hoping they were now far enough away not to notice. She wanted to know if that ripple of tension had settled – the worry, the distress that had surfaced earlier. She imagined it was about the father, or partner, or whoever he was. But it looked like they were together again. The mum took a bag or two from the boy, the grandmother reached for the little girl’s hand, and the boy – now released back into youth – pulled out his phone and popped in his earbuds.
The automatic doors swept open for them and ejected them into the rain before shutting them out. Silently, Val wished them a safe journey and a hopeful outcome, wherever they were heading.
Sometimes, the untold stories made her want to cry. She didn’t know what was true for that family, or whether it mattered to know. She didn’t know if her silent well-wishing into the universe made any difference. How did we affect each other? How did they make poetic connection? Wasn’t this the sympoesis that Graham was on about?
She looked over at him. He wasn’t absorbed by the book any more. He was looking at her. He raised his eyebrows. She looked over toward the door. She thought maybe he understood – that she’d been seeing a family off on their next adventure.
The space the family had left was already filled again. The place was so crowded now that strangers had to share tables. Two lorry drivers sat side by side – same table, same takeaway wrappers – but wrapped in entirely different spheres of presence, their invisible boundaries firm and impenetrable.
“Found anything else in your book?” Val asked. She just wanted to connect, unsure how to express what had just absorbed her completely.
“She talks about making kin, not babies,” Graham said. “Something called the Chthulucene. About how humans and non-humans are all connected – from the underworld, she says. So, everything is kin, if we make the effort.”
“Is that what we do, then? You and me? Make kin, not babies?”
“I’ve no idea.”
But Val was mostly talking to herself now, caught in her occasional regret at not having a flesh and blood experience of motherhood. Still, she was fairly sure she’d made kin in her own way.
Her phone pinged. It was Joe. Heavy traffic, a lot of rain. Might be a long journey.
What IS good work?
I have found it valuable, in this postdoctoral research, to present the fiction in the order it was written, rather than cherry-picking the high drama moments. It forces me to pay attention to the boring, humdrum, everyday care work that so often goes unnoticed and unacknowledged. The ideas around operationalising our m/other tongue are, therefore, growing sequentially and evolving as the narrative develops. Each revisit pushes me to understand more clearly why I wrote what I did, and so what of my tacit maternal knowing can be moved into the realm of words.
This post, therefore, has taken me to places that I have not visited before as I try and make sense of what ‘work’ might be and why, when it comes to using my tacit maternal knowing in all areas of my working life, I come up against barriers that make it hard even to recognise that knowledge as valuable, or as work at all.
The ideas emerged from sitting with the two pieces of fiction. They kept pulling me back to themes from the last two post: staying with the troubled, taking the non-problem seriously, and the painfulness of being miss-seen.
Not much happens in the fiction. The drama is quiet – domestic, you might say. (But what tone does that word carry in your head? Dismissive? Minimising? Suggestive of conflict between intimate partners? Boring? Terrifying, but safely ‘out there’, not personal?)
As I kept returning to the stories over the month, I found myself increasingly drawn to the question of non-action. How central is it to this ongoing attempt to surface and give shape to our tacit maternal knowing in professional spaces? What kind of hard work is it, to do nothing? It’s a sort of don’t just do something – sit there! reversal of what’s usually seen as normal, proper, valuable, or manstream work.
It feels like a fundamental dilemma in trying to promote this strange idea of leading through our m/other tongue – this insistence on taking the non-problem seriously, and recognising that ‘nothing happening’ might actually be the work.
In my research practice, particularly when editing the fiction, I find myself increasingly drawn to the characters’ backstories. It’s an attempt to take the non-problem – the patterns behind habitual action – seriously, as a way of making visible what is known at a tacit level.
For most of my professional and academic life, my ‘first language’ has been psychotherapy. I could choose to interpret the fiction through a Kleinian lens – seeing the familiar split between good and bad, the good breast and the bad breast (Klein et al., 1997). But that would lead me back down a more traditional therapeutic path, one grounded in problem identification.
Being problem and deficit driven is not the Theraplay way. Theraplay looks for what is working well and builds on it and is, therefore, fundamental to using our m/other tongue.
The designation of good and bad in traditional psychotherapeutic approaches seems to come from a positionality that is unarticulated, but assumed - shaped by revered authors, publications, and status within hierarchical structures matured inside a patriarchal history. The experts in traditional theories rarely appear in the story as themselves, but instead talk about a child’s experience of being mothered, from a supposedly ‘objective’ stance.
Mothering, however, is not a hands-off activity. It is deeply subjective. It is a messy get-in-there-and-get-on-with-it activity. Taking that as our guide, to use our m/other tongue in our professional working lives, as leaders in our field, I suggest we have to get in there and work ‘it’ out (whatever the it may be) from the inside. When I think about leadership here, I’m thinking about the ‘being guided by the adult’ core concept of Theraplay – how we lead/guide in our roles as clinicians, therapist educators, researchers, and managers.
In contemplating what work is – and what might be considered ‘good work’ or ‘bad work’ – I’ve been trying to draw out the tacit knowledge embedded in the fiction. I’m looking for what might help me (and us) rethink how we become leaders in our fields without feeling that leadership means complying with the norms of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, but also without having to live on the margins. Where is that central ground where work is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, neither ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’, or any other binaries that might come to our mind.
As I thought more deeply about our traditional clinical theorists, I realised their ideas often feel like constructs of others’ distress, rather than constructs by the distressed. Such theories don’t feel like they come from within – not from the workers themselves. And when we think about how to operationalise our m/other tongue, perhaps our true ‘workers’ are the mother and baby, just as Ann Jernberg (1979, p.4) saw in developing Theraplay. They are the primary source of knowledge that we should return to: “what does a normal mother do to and for her baby? How does a healthy baby respond?”.
Defining work, rather than describing the phenomenon of work, can pull us away from the tacit, because definitions require an external, thought driven standpoint to mark a boundary. I suggest from the unconscious, not-thought-through position of the manstream, boundaries are what we see as essential to definitions. But boundaries create separation, drawing a line between inside and outside, and setting the stage for Othering.
I’d argue that relying too much on definitions and boundaries risks Othering the troubled, rather than staying with them. This isn’t to dismiss the value of definition and boundary, just not to prioritise them above the unspoken, fluid, tacit experience of the kind of work we’re discussing. Maybe I could simply stay with the Theraplay philosophy and ask: What is working well, here and now, for this person? At this moment in time, what helps them thrive, have good social skills, be members of communities, learn, and develop emotional resilence?– and then build on that. Never mind the manstream. Call on the wise women, and see through their eyes.
Using our m/other tongue as a guide in our practice – whether as therapists, therapist educators, researchers, or managers – means staying with the tacit. It means staying with the knowing that goes beyond words, with the process of being in knowing, which is always unfolding, rather than clinging to fixed knowledge except at brief punctuation points where it becomes necessary for a specific purpose.
We need to be very careful not to confuse the product – the definition of what work might or, to use man-speak, should be – with the process of working.
As a Theraplayer, work becomes the process rather than the product. It’s proper, complex, confusing, messy, sometimes tough to digest, nurture-work. It is not junk-food nurture/a quick fix: attractive, replicable, and tasty, but leaving you feeling empty, with slippery, greasy fingers.
In this month’s fiction, we have the two teenage boys each doing important work.
So far, my focus on operationalising our m/other tongue may have leaned too heavily on the tacit maternal knowing in the mother-to-infant relationship, without enough attention to the hard developmental work the infant, child, or young person is doing themselves, driven from within. This is the other half of Ann Jernberg’s (1979) statement about using what the mother does to and for the infant and then what the heathy infant does in response.
Thinking again about the developmental phases I’ve mentioned before, toddlerhood stands out as a phase of exploration without experience. Erikson (1995) frames this as the tension between shame and autonomy. The toddler needs to relax into the guidance of someone more experienced, so they can explore with reduced risk. To me, this is maternal leadership: using one’s power in service of the other, creating structured spaces that enable self-discovery through autonomy.
In adolescence, we’re dealing with a different process - a turning outward, the making of one’s own way in the world. This is where Erikson’s identity versus role confusion stage comes in (Erikson, 1995, and see June’s post). Shame is still present, but the direction of travel is different. The hard developmental work for the adolescent is about starting to become a leader in their own life, while the adult’s role is to gradually and appropriately pass on that power of leadership and allow the adolescent to experiment with it.
I believe this is where we are in the process of moving the idea of tacit maternal knowing from my doctoral thesis into a usable, supportive theory that can help us change the world, or at least our parts of it, for the better.
By positioning women as no more morally developed than children - remember Kohlberg’s theory, which claimed women’s moral judgement never moved beyond childhood (Garz, 2009) - the patriarchal world has consistently failed to recognise mothering and the experience of being a developing child as work. It has set up barriers that prevent us from seeing the moral, ethical, and loving labour of holding emotional and developmental space as real, and often very hard, work.
I can’t avoid the term emotional labour any longer. Arnold-Foster and Moulds (2022) acknowledge that the meaning of the term has shifted from Hochschild’s original concept in the 1980s. Going back to read her original work was helpful in seeing how her ideas developed (Hochschild, 2012).
Although some examples in the book feel dated, I found it fascinating how central imagination seemed to be in the management of emotion as a worker. Hochschild describes this as something that can be either exploited in the workplace or used to enhance the professional identity of the worker when emotional labour - that is, managing one’s own feelings to perform a role expertly by processing the feelings of others - is recognised within the system.
In particular, she highlights how imagined stories lead to more empathetic responses to difficult clients or customers. This reminded me of how vital I feel it is in maternal work to imagine a baby into being (Winnitcott 1995, Wright 2009, Mayes 2020, Raphael-Luff 2020).
I want to go back and read Hochschild’s book again in more detail. It resonates so much with what I’m saying about our m/other tongue that I’m almost afraid I’ve read it through biased eyes! It legitimises and makes sense of my need to imagine backstories for characters. It affirms for me that imagination is emotional labour and good work - but I’m still confused about why the term emotional labour has become so common, while the concept itself seems to have become diluted.
So, what do the backstories of the two teenagers, the imagination work, tell me about operationalising our m/other tongue?
One family has a sick father. A mother sick with worry. A mother sick with worry about her daughter, who is also a mother, who is sick with worry and staying with the trouble of the father’s illness. Everyone is overloaded, emotionally preoccupied, overworked. Everyone is troubled, and troubled by their loved others’ trouble.
The mother calls on her own mother over the half-term break because she knows she can’t mother her children, her husband, and herself all at once. The fears and emotional burdens of both mother and grandmother inhibit their ability to lead the boy and the girl. You can see what their problem is!
But the adolescent, a young adult, is able to mother the little girl, his sister. He makes connections and holds an interactive and storytelling space to keep his sister, and himself, emotionally safe, making it possible for reconnection to happen once his mother and grandmother have discharged their troubledness. He m/others. He works. He works hard to care for his sister and himself. He is able to both lead and then, when he can, fall back into being led. Val notices the work of mothering he is doing, and, just as she worked in her clinical practice, she works because she notices and makes up stories that enabled her empathy. Taking the non-problem seriously - this family has no problem!
In leading with our m/other tongue - by telling stories and making narratives even when troubled - we create empathy, which leads to community, connection, forgiveness, and understanding. Patriarchy has shut its eyes to this kind of leadership because maternal leadership – care for others – demands that we manage our vulnerability. It requires us to have experienced enough reparative shame in toddlerhood to hold our autonomy, from which we can then relate with care and intention (Bunting, 2021).
One of the most interesting things about putting the ‘data’ of my research into art-making – generating fiction to access my tacit knowing – is that it challenges the assumption that work must produce a fact, or a tangible object that can be monetised. It shifts the definition of work away from production and towards process. The narrative matters only in so far as it leads to empathetic engagement with the other.
The manstream might dismiss such imagination knowledge – might say: “Stories aren’t facts. You can’t corroborate them.” And underneath that the carried meaning is: “You’re stupid, weird - a sneaky failure.” This is the burden of othering that’s been placed on Val. (Is it like that for you too? I want to ask in the spirit of checking out my heuristic moment.)
Looking, thinking, wondering, caring about, caring for (when possible) – that is work. Maternal work. It’s not sneaky, weird, or stupid, no matter what the manstream tries to persuade me to believe about myself.
(But I still struggle to shake free from the coercive grip of the manstream, my inner vocation to care. The manstream continues to warp my thinking and tells me that my care is selfish, that I’m just gratifying my own needs, snooping, or trying to control others through caring. It’s a mindboggling entanglement that has hamstrung me for years.)
The second young man in this month’s fiction shows us what happens when people in power don’t imagine the lives of others. Interestingly, I find it harder to create a backstory for him. Why do his parents share care? What’s their joint income? What kind of life do they lead? Why don’t I want to go there?
To go there requires the emotional labour of imagining the painful horror of not being imagined into being, of not being seen as you wish to be seen (see the post from May). Their family isn't functioning well, but their troubles are hidden. They are the ‘bad others’.
The other family – whose troubles are more visible – felt more imaginable, more fluid, more open to empathy. More relatable. That’s what growing with the troubled looks like. It’s not about the fiction as polished product, but the process of staying close to what is hard and real. I need to take the second family’s non-problem seriously, and do the imagination work of feeling into what’s going on for them, even if it is harder and less palatable.
Here, the faithfulness aspect of living by our m/other tongue becomes vital. Sometimes - often - such maternal knowing is going to be dismissed, along with the knower. Being Othered hurts. Feeling what I value being devalued is deeply distressing and infuriating, especially when these ideas move beyond theory and into the real lives of people – people who are being starved, bombed, and snuffed out because no one is imagining their humanness.
Who can stand by when we see images of babies, children, young people, and adults starving, terrified? And yet, for much of the world’s suffering, I can only care about, not practically care for. Still, I can place myself in that vulnerable position of imagining them, empathising with them – doing the hard imagination-work. I can carry out the emotional labour of feeling despair and suffering, and let my anger lead me towards action – whatever action is available to me.
In my faith life, sometimes that action takes the form of placing the imagined into a prayer space (alongside, of course, donating money to organisations that might be able to deliver hands-on care). I am sure other religions, faiths, and belief systems have similar processes of calling upon a higher power to intervene on behalf of the suffering when we can’t practically do anything about it ourselves. In that space of imagining and praying, love can be kept alive. So can hope. And through that, we retain the energy to act when action is possible.
Filling in the backstory, staying with the troubled, taking the non-problem seriously, being domestic – these are all about waiting until challenge can be tolerated, so that growth can happen. These are maternal skills. Not quick fixes, but emotional labour – hard work, good work – that supports the development of the other.
But still… it would be nice to have some praise for such work!
To be honest, I don’t think the fiction stands up as Art. Instead, it’s more like playing with the troubled – not in a cruel, cat-and-mouse way, but in a deeply human way. Appreciating the talents and struggles of another human being, even in their flaws, and finding what works as a foundation for making things even better. This is the heart of Theraplay philosophy and practice. As Ann Jernberg would say, all you need to know is to look at mothering - but while she was locating this in the mother–infant dyad, I want to grow the perspective to include a theory of leadership in many professional settings.
Maybe the fiction will never become art with a capital A, no matter how much I edit it. But that’s not really the point – this is research, not art. The aim isn’t production, it’s illumination: making visible the tacit knowledge I already hold. It’s about bringing to the surface what I know, deep down, about how we work with our m/other tongue as therapists, therapist educators, researchers, and managers in organisations.
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Whose backstory do I need to imagine in order to empathise with both the cared about and the cared for? How does this imagination-work help me support them in having fulfilling relational experiences; in building positive attachments and developing a felt sense of safety?
Bibliography
Arnold-Forster, A., & Moulds, A. S. E. (Eds.). (2022). Feelings and work in modern history: Emotional labour and emotions about labour. Bloomsbury.
Bunting, M. (2021). Labours of love: The crisis of care. Granta.
Erikson, E. H. (1995). Childhood and society. Vintage.
Garz, D. (2009). Lawrence Kohlber: An introduction. Budrich.
Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Jernberg, A. M. (1979). Theraplay: A new treatment using structured play for problem children and their families. Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Klein, M., Strachey, A., & Thorner, H. A. (1997). The psycho-analysis of children.
Mayes, L. (2020). The Imagined Infant: An Introduction to the Section. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 73(1), 216–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.2020.1690904
Raphael-Leff, J. (2020). Absolute Hospitality and the Imagined Baby. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 73(1), 230–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.2020.1690906
Winnicott, D. W. (1997). Playing and reality. Routledge.