[Are "behaviorally disordered" migrant children of "noncompliant" parents treatable? Interdisciplinary cooperation between system-oriented school psychology and psychoanalytically oriented therapy]

Abstract

This case presentation describes the cooperation between experts of different basic training and theoretical provenance. A system oriented school psychologist takes on the 'case' of a massively behaviourally abnormal, aggressive, and marginalized girl of working migrants from the lower stratum, prepares the way for psychotherapy and transfers the treatment to a psychoanalyst. In this case the role of the school psychologist consists of receiving a crisis situation which is slipping out of hand and redefining the problems with all parties involved. By expanding the perspective to the context of school-family-immigration society contradictions and breaks become evident. The culture shock of the first migration phase was reinacted by the parents in the difficult confrontation with the Swiss institutions. In contrast to psychosocial sees the contradictions as being logical-congruent and tries to build bridges and activate change. The transformation of rigid reality constructs is furthered and psychotherapeutic treatment is mediated, explained and accompanied during the process. The role of the psychoanalyst consists of taking up the relationship to the girl and establishing a serviceable working relationship with the parents. She has to recognize the girl's inner and unconscious conflicts which are actualized in transference and countertransference in the therapeutic process. After empathetic interpretative work she offers new forms of dealing with conflicts which take the girl's outer reality (family, school, migrant situation, cultural reality) into consideration. Accompanying the parents intensively at the same time broadens their competence in raising their daughter. In this case the neurotic developmental disorder is strongly connected with the migration problem.