1st Edition

Crisis Intervention in Residential Treatment The Clinical Innovations of Fritz Redl

Edited By William C Morse Copyright 1991
    116 Pages
    by Routledge

    116 Pages
    by Routledge

    All settings where disturbed children spend time, such as camps or residential schools, are periodically faced with crisis situations. Methods for dealing with these crises and for counseling the children involved are continually needed. Crisis Intervention in Residential Treatment is both a demonstration of how essential Fritz Redl’s treatment concepts remain today and a tribute to his genius. The authors bring order and reason to the quest for better ways to understand and respond to confrontation and aggression in residential treatment settings. They provide practical and successful strategies to cope with these situations and prevent them from occurring. By exploring and expanding some of Redl’s most important theories and practices, the authors encourage a new generation of child care workers to find the same stimulation and satisfaction in his work as his original followers found. The contributors, each deeply affected and influenced in his or her own way by Redl, provide not only a moving tribute to a great child care worker and innovator, but also a rejuvenation of some of the most valued ideas in the field.

    Sharing Redl’s concern for daily practice with very difficult youngsters, this understanding book focuses on the action setting and the development of theory from practice, not the application of theory to practice. By concentrating on such topics as the use of life space interviewing, aggression and counter-aggression in staff, and the contrast of interpersonal and ecological perspectives with current “get tough” approaches, Crisis Intervention in Residential Treatment is an eminently useful guide for everyone dealing with children in group settings. Psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, teachers, and residential personnel will all learn effective ways of coping with and preventing crisis situations.

    Contents Introduction and Perspective
    • A Letter to Fritz
    • What’s Old--Is New: Fritz Redl’s Teaching Reaches Into the Present
    • Fritz Redl: Matchmaker to Child and Environment: A Retrospective
    • What Fritz Redl Taught Me About Aggression: Understanding the Dynamics of Aggression and Counteraggression in Students and Staff
    • Back to the Future: Effective Residential Group Care and Treatment for Children and Youth and the Fritz Redl Legacy
    • Fritz Redl and Residential Treatment at Hawthorn Center
    • Consultation: Redl’s Influence
    • I Wonder What Fritz Would Say
    • A Brief Introduction to Redl’s Writing
    • Reference Notes Included

    Biography

    William C Morse