70 years in The Bush

Mulberry Bush School is one of our oldest and most modern therapeutic communities in the UK. It has done an extraordinary job of adapting to a changing world - and not always in ways that many of our TC fraternity would approve of. But it is still there, and no others I know of could say that after being around for seventy years...

Here is the foreword I have written for their forthcoming book:

Although many see our current times as dark days for psychoanalytic understanding, and complex treatments that defy easy manualisation, and frequent closures of well-established therapeutic communities, the flourishing of Mulberry Bush through several difficult decades says something else. At ‘the Bush’, the power of the underlying ideas, and the necessity of having a meaningful understanding of the deeply troubled children in their care, has allowed a profoundly psychotherapeutic school not only survive in several years of these dark times, but to flourish as a beacon of excellent practice  – and shine a light for others to follow, as they have now started to do.

Of course, this has not been without accommodations and adaptations to what could be called an industrialised and commercialised system of ‘state-regulated childhood’. And this system is regulated to such an extent that some utterly human emotional support and care – that has been a natural part of primate behaviour since we were only as evolved as Harlow’s monkeys – are now subject to state surveillance and scrutiny. We live in such an anxious and untrusting age that the exercise of ‘therapeutic ordinariness’ is becoming almost impossible – in the National Health Service, in social care, in criminal justice and - of course - in education.

 But despite the wider environmental toxicity, the Mulberry Bush has ‘followed the rules’ and somehow been able to maintain an oasis of sanity in this maddening world. They have managed to keep the therapeutic imperatives in the foreground, and to largely keep the modernist impingements in the background. The amount of work that is required to do that cannot be overestimated; it requires nerves of steel when put under cross examination about risk management, operational policies or safeguarding procedures by the regulators – who aim to act with precise and mechanical objectivity. If only they knew! Of course, at some level, they do. But such subjective and complex considerations are not allowed to enter the equation of modern public sector governance.

As a great believer in the implicit themes that weave the history of therapeutic communities, I cannot help but think of two images. One is of the tank commander Wilfred Bion in the First World War, long before he wrote his theories of group process. He knew that a tank under fire is an extremely dangerous place to be, with the ‘nameless dread’ of its unthinkable horrors and human degradation if the tank suffers a direct hit. And the universal need for that immensely powerful and primitive experience of containment when under any sort of severe physical or emotional threat – simply in order to survive, and be able to live afterwards. The other image is one I have always associated with the Mulberry Bush: of a fluffy round rusk, dipped in warm milk. It is given to a small child who is behaving as if his or her head is full of tanks and explosions and trauma – and feels utterly uncontained. Then that sensuous nurturant thing arrives: the experience changes everything and puts the world to rights. At least until next time.

These extreme feelings of love and hate, of care and terror, and of attachment and abandonment, are all the daily bread and butter of this work with children. Yet these children’s inner worlds have to be held and contained in the real external world of schools in twenty first century England. The staff and managers here have to meet the demands of OFSTED, cope with severely restricted local authority funding, and live in a popular culture that belligerently demands diagnostic certainty and quick fixes. However, the work of the Mulberry Bush has proved that it is possible to establish and maintain a different way of working in this safe space – protected from the primitive terrors that its children fear, and the grown-up madness that the adults live in.

The adaptations and accommodations have been in ‘learning the language’, and ‘playing the game’: those of us who work or believe in other therapeutic communities have a lot to learn from them. ‘Learning the language’ is about being up-to-date with concepts used in influential publications, policy and research – such as ‘evidence-based practice’, ‘trauma-informed care’, ‘adverse childhood experiences’, ‘emotional development’ and ‘relational practice’. It is not enough to just parrot the buzz-words, though. They need to mapped onto the deep understanding and language that the school has been accumulating throughout its seventy years, with their concepts like ‘unintegrated children’, ‘primary experience’, ‘core complex’ and ‘emotional distance regulation’, and to do so without forgetting the importance of these fundamental concepts in actually doing the day-to-day work. This book is full of rich clinical examples of these ideas in action.

‘Playing the game’ is more about organisational survival – knowing what to do so that commissioners, civil servants, council officers, regulators, and even banks, take you seriously. Networking is an important part of this – and having as good a view and understanding outwards as you do inwards. The social entrepreneurship needed for the Mulberry Bush’s Outreach Programme is an excellent example of this – but it also brings the benefit of their long and deep experience to help many other troubled children. The International Centre for Therapeutic Care has great ambitions to spread the word even more widely, and together with the field’s archive, will surely cement the Mulberry Bush as the jewel in the crown of British Therapeutic Childcare.

In a way, all schools should be therapeutic – in promoting emotional growth, enabling relationships, effective communication between people, and a robust sense of personal agency - if only they were! But this book makes it clear how the Mulberry Bush has developed its ways to do it with some of the most troubled children in the land - and intends to do something useful with its ideas.