25/02/2026
📖Finding a Way to the Child
Selected Clinical Papers 1983-2021
By Margaret Rustin
Edited by Kate Stratton and Simon Cregeen
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An excerpt from the chapter: ‘Multiple Families in Mind’
“Katy, aged nine, in a recent conversation with her adoptive mother explained that she did not want any contact with her birth mother. Specifically, she did not want her adoptive mother to write the agreed annual letter to her birth mother giving a brief account of her and her brother’s progress. She was very relieved to reassure herself that photographs were not being sent and she certainly did not want to send a card or note herself. Why not? Because, she anxiously confided to her adoptive mother, she feared that her birth mother might be able to trace her via her fingerprints.
It is as if Katy’s sense of safety in her new family is intruded on quite out-of-the-blue by this figure of a mother-kidnapper. From Katy’s point of view, the nightmare could always start to happen in real life. Explanation and reassurance about her position does not help her, for in her internal world she remains at the mercy of an all-knowing, all-powerful and terrifying mother. This is the legacy of the neglect and abuse she suffered as a small child […] Yet her current delight is in learning to canoe – the snug fit for one within the firm structure of the canoe, the special clothes and life-jacket, could represent the absent longed-for link to a caring sustaining mother, who holds the baby up above her terrors instead of plunging her into them …”
