Oxfordchildpsychotherapy.co.uk and Julia Shay, Child Psychotherapist
Julia Shay is a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist working in the NHS in the South West of England and with the Oxford Parent Infant Project (OXPIP). She also has a private practice based in Oxford. She has seven years’ experience of working with children, adolescents and parents in NHS settings. She has a particular interest in working with parents and young children together – work that need not be as long-term as psychoanalytic psychotherapy has traditionally been. She is available to work with children and young people up to late adolescence and with parents from the ante-natal period onwards.
She also works as a trainer with the Solihull Approach, training Health Visitors, teachers, Social Workers and others to integrate ideas from psychodynamic thinking and child development research into their work with children and parents.
She is a member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists, the Association of Child Psychotherapists, and is registered with the British Psychoanalytic Council. She is also a member of the Pegasus Psychotherapy Group.
* Julia Shay regrets that she is unable to accept any new patients for the time being. * If you wish to consult a Child or Adolescent Psychotherapist, please get in touch with Pegasus Psychotherapy at www.pegasuspsychotherapy.co.uk
Child Psychotherapy
A Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist’s training is based on psychoanalytic theory and extensive supervised clinical experience.
The twin pioneers of child analysis were Melanie Klein and Anna Freud in the mid Twentieth Century. The third major contributor to the practice of child psychotherapy was Donald Winnicott, writing a few years later. Since then child psychotherapy has also been influenced by the insights of Attachment Theory (work begun by John Bowlby), child development research and, most recently, neuroscience, which is helping us understand the effect of early experience on the “hard-wiring” of brain development.
The fore-runners of today’s Child Psychotherapists were the Psychiatric Social Workers employed in the child guidance movement. In 1949 the Association of Child Psychotherapists was established. Much of our work in the NHS is with the most troubled children for whom other approaches have failed, including many Looked After Children.
