This paper introduces the major concepts and practices of narrative therapy in work with children and adolescents. Drawing on archaeological and narrative metaphors, the principal concepts of externalizing conversations and reauthoring are explained. These concepts are used to derive the main tools of narrative therapy, the formulation of different types and sequences of questions. Two problem areas are used to provide extended examples of a narrative orientation with young people: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and young people's struggles with parents over issues of adolescence. Prospects for the relationship between narrative therapy and psychology are discussed.

Educational psychologists typically respond to child referrals for problematic behaviour by focusing on the problem. Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) provides an alternative that eliminates the time-consuming task of assessment of the “problem.” This application of SFBT involved three groups of primary school teachers, each focused on one child’s behaviour. The participants reported favourable outcomes of reduced problematic behaviour in the three children and increased collegial support.

Psychodynanzic counselling is based upon, and informed by, psychoanalytic insights. The origins include the work of Freud, the Post Freudians, and the Object Relations school. These schools of thought embrace concepts of primitive infantile emotions and states of mind that produce overwhelming feelings of anxiety and fear and against which defences are formed to maintain a psychic equilibrium. Although these defences may have roots in the past, changes can only be effected by thinking about their significance in the present. The psychodynamic counsellor attempts to help clients make sense of their current situation by focussing on the actual dynamics of what is happening outside the counselling room with others and inside the counselling room with the counsellor: Thus, repeated and “stuck” ways of being with others are brought to light in tertms of transference and countertransference. In addition, painful and unbearable feelings are shared and contained in the relationship so that clients are more able to reflect upon and understand their own contribution to their present situation and to respond more constructively to that situation.