Encounter: An Act of Translation: Essays that began life in my work as a clinical psychologist

This collection of essays explores the theme of encounter within the context of my work as a clinical psychologist in the field of paediatrics and neuropsychology. Encounter in clinical practice involves using a variety of professional frameworks and disciplines to understand the wide range of health conditions and problems children present with; it often involves many other languages in addition, including those of the body. The territory I worked in stretched flexibly between body and mind. Often thought of as separate domains there is constant traffic between the two. Each family I met with also left something behind in me as a person as well as a clinician, an accumulating store of bits and pieces left from lives I had entered for a while. The accrual of this kind of knowledge has no ready name; outwith the usual frames of reference, its value is of a kind that is not easy to translate. These essays address the same sorts of subjects I used to write about using a neutral objective voice; moving between registers and forms they reflect our shifting relationship with language itself. Each adds to the one before— part story, part reflection, part information— each a collage exploring how different kinds of knowledge develop and how we move between them. I introduce the reader to a painting that used to hang on my clinic wall as a companion to thought, and I also engage with the work of Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher and writer who also chose to move between realms, between the knowledge of science and the kind more easily released by the poetic imagination. At the end of the collection is an additional essay which takes the form of an interview about the process of writing them.