Welcoming the Stranger: On the Importance of a Clinical Attitude of Curiosity When Working With Children as Patients

Abstract

In The Soul’s Code (1996), Archetypal Psychologist James Hillman wrote about the acorn theory, the idea that each of us has a unique destiny that is announced in childhood and which we seek to fulfill over the course of a lifetime. Child development experts have offered many definitions of children and childhood, and, often, those definitions have led to a mode of treatment . Developmental milestones, expectations and “norms”, have framed childhood and what has been forced out is the coming to being of the child. This theoretical dissertation works within a hermeneutic framework to mine the literature for clinical attitudes about children and childhood. The researcher then proposes the theory that what is missing from child psychology, is a curiosity in the approach of the clinician. Very possibly from a place of anxiety about the unknown, child psychology has become a practice of diagnosis and management, or, in other words, a working from a fantasy of knowing. Through becoming comfortable with our own uncertainty as clinicians we can, this researcher believes, guide our young patients and even their families toward a place of organic unfolding, a discovering of the unique destiny as supposed by Hillman.