Why Can't I Help this Child to Learn?

Helen High is a retired educational psychotherapist and child and adolescent psychotherapist. She formerly taught on, and served on the training committee of, the child and adolescent psychotherapy training at the British Association of Psychotherapists, London. She is a founder member of the Caspari Foundation, London, which runs the training in educational psychotherapy - a method of working with children whose emotional problems give rise to difficulties in learning that is the subject of this book. She has had ten articles published, eight of them in professional journals and two as chapters in books. Having graduated in psychology at Manchester University, Helen went on to take the postgraduate certificate in education there. She then taught for three years in primary schools in London. She trained as an educational psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic, where Irene Caspari was one of her tutors and supervised her on work with children who were failing to learn to read adequately in spite of normal intelligence. This was the work that Caspari developed, combining remedial teaching with activities that lend themselves to self-expression, that is now known as educational psychotherapy.

Introduction: the origins of educational psychotherapy , The Theoretical Background to Educational Psychotherapy , Theoretical principles applied in educational psychotherapy , Psychoanalytic theory of development and unconscious mental processes , The potential space and indirect communication in educational psychotherapy , “Once upon a time”: the symbolic meaning of fairy tales and their use in educational psychotherapy , Educational Psychotherapy Case Studies , Work with a hard-to-reach child , The effect of loss on learning: the stillborn sibling , A boy who used numbers as a defence against feelings , Family dynamics and the educational experience , Applications of Educational Psychotherapy , Therapeutic story groups: educational psychotherapy in a school setting , What can educational psychotherapy teach teachers?