Kinship care: uncannily close for comfort?

ABSTRACT This paper explores the impact of kinship care upon the child, as observed through the clinical lens of child psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It acknowledges the social care and policy landscape, which retains a widely held belief that kinship care is a preferable option to foster care. In the light of this belief, the paper also draws attention to the internal and external dynamics inherent in the complexities of this arrangement as presented in the child’s psychotherapy and the parallel parent work. Clinical vignettes are used to illuminate the often unconscious, painful and confusing thoughts, feelings and fantasies experienced by both the child and the kinship parent. Psychoanalytic ideas relating to Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ and Winnicott’s paper ‘Mirror-role of the mother and family in child development’ are used to underpin the clinical material and reflections. The paper culminates in emphasising the need for practitioners to be attentive to these dynamics, and to provide robust support for the kinship parents, in processing their kinship experience and the intergenerational traumas it may stir up.