Anjali Grier is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and a member of its Scientific committee. She is also a member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists and an accredited training analyst for the ACP. She has many years of experience of working in the National Health Service. This includes working in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, both in the community and in hospital settings, including a hospital Perinatal Unit, Paediatric Oncology and Eating Disorder Units. Her experience also includes that of Visiting Lecturer at the Tavistock Centre and teaching abroad. She is currently in full time private practice in London, working psychoanalytically with adults, adolescents, parents and young children; she offers supervision to colleagues in the UK and abroad. She has presented her paper, “The Superego in Infancy and Young Childhood”, at a Scientific Meeting of the British Psychoanalytic Society in October 2023. She has published in the International Journal of Infant Observation, and a chapter in Young Child Observation edited by Margaret Rustin, Simonetta Adamo, in 2013.
Sound and Silence in Group Psychotherapy with Nursery Aged Immigrant Children, with Special Reference to an Electively Mute Child
I will look at the experience of sound and silence as it was expressed within a group I ran, some years ago, at a nursery school. This group was set up to try and facilitate the integration of children from a minority immigrant community, into the nursery, where the majority of the children were white and from middle-class backgrounds. All the children referred were between the ages of four and six years old. A third of the referrals over a period of four years were of children experiencing elective mutism. Others were extremely isolated and socially withdrawn, or experiencing communication difficulties, and problems with aggression and disruptive behavior. Of particular significance was the complex issue of language that contributed to the group dynamics. The meaning and significance of language, and the fact of not having one fluent common language was a painful ongoing theme, creating a soundscape which could, at times be noisy, volatile, dissonant, cut into by silences that were frozen, hostile. In my paper I discuss the case of an electively mute child and her engagement initially individually with me, and then in the group, and her gradual movement from silence to the use of verbal communication. I discuss the significance and meaning of language, in the context of the intergenerational experience of separation, loss and trauma.