When Love is Not Enough: The Management of Covert Dynamics in Organizations that Treat Children and Adolescents.

The old-fashioned focus on individuals as separate from their surroundings is no longer tenable. The papers in this edited volume are informed by the Group Relations model which was designed to help those providing services to children and adolescents to evaluate treatment programs and to make needed improvements. The chapters describe how a multitude of factors--the competence of staff; the safety, nurturing, and protective elements of the emotional, physical, and political setting; and overt and covert organizational dynamics--determine whether or not a treatment setting accomplishes its therapeutic aims. The specific issues discussed here include the residential setting in psychotherapeutic work with adolescents, angry children and frightened staff, applications of the Tavistock Group Relations Model in community mental health and protective service systems, revitalizing human service organizations, and the school romance, which is an analysis of the subjective experience of school life. Topics covered include the emphasis on groups-as-a-whole in problem solving and treatment design; narrowing the gap between plan and outcome; issues of staff selection, training, and development; the dynamics involved in the psychiatric treatment of children, revitalizing organizations, and countertransference responses in the treatment of children and adolescents. Each paper features a short bibliography. (RJM)