Masculinity in the consulting room: A child psychotherapist’s experiences

ABSTRACT This paper takes its cue from those given at the conference Psychotherapy and Healthy Masculinity. These prompted the author to reflect on how he experienced masculinity as a psychotherapist working with families within NHS England’s CAMHS. The difficulties in children leading to their referral demonstrated a problematic parenting in which the diminished role of the father was causal. Beliefs about masculinity held within the family matrix were largely ones that functioned to fill epistemic lacunae. Such filling represents a double injustice. Not only is there very little empirically based thinking about fathers in our western culture for families to draw upon to make sense of their experiences. Instead, this dearth is often falsely compensated through ideologically derived pejorative concepts, that invariably do not relate to experience. The paper discusses the perniciousness of relying upon ideological perceptions of masculinity through focusing upon how easily they are acquired and work against the mental health of children and their families.