ABSTRACT
Arriving at my first work discussion seminar, I had some idea, gleaned eagerly and anxiously from conversations with other students, about this seminar being to do with conscious and unconscious communication in work with children or young people. I was aware of feeling relieved that as a consequence of my own hard-won experience as a patient in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I thought I knew a thing or two about unconscious processes that I could now put to good use in what I comfortably imagined would be a fairly abstract though not, of course, impersonal discussion. In other words, I did not arrive with the expectation that this would be a seminar that would touch me emotionally, let alone play a part in changing my perspective on and approach to working life.
