By Xavier Fourtou – Welcomer at Bubble & Speak and Psychoanalyst, and Kristina Valendinova – Welcomer at Bubble & Speak and Psychoanalyst.

Bubble & Speak is a Community Interest Company which operates a drop-in centre for children under 4 years old alongside their parents and carers following the concept of “Maison verte”. We opened almost 5 years ago and offer a session once a week on Monday mornings from 10am to 12.30pm.

Families are welcomed in a dedicated room within the Tate Public Library, an old building which plays an important social role in Stockwell, a cosmopolitan and diverse neighbourhood of South London. Our team includes 11 psychoanalytically oriented professionals, female and male, with a mix of backgrounds, ages, countries of origin and languages spoken. We are all highly motivated to accompany young children in the construction and development of their subjectivity.

Each Monday, three of us do our best to facilitate babies and toddlers to play, meet friends, and even argue if necessary, so that they can be heard and addressed. Sessions are also an opportunity for parents, who are sometimes very isolated and struggling with the challenge of raising a child, to meet and share experiences.

On January 16th and 17th 2021, Bubble & Speak was invited to participate in a conference organised by the Freud Museum titled Psychoanalysis for the People. We had the opportunity to present the originality of our approach: a drop-in for young children and their carers where no registration is required and where the young ones are not asked to engage in specific activities, but where their freedom is encouraged, and their singularity welcomed.

The title of our talk was: “Taking the Risk of Welcoming”. We decided to develop two specific challenging questions we often discuss within the team: the financial participation of families we host and the importance we give to anonymity.

1) Payment

Although at Bubble & Speak we do not charge any entrance fee, we do accept donations from the families, the amount of which they are to determine themselves. This has historically been the case for most MV-type structures. These are some of the questions we have been asking:

• Is the payment we ask for at Bubble & Speak a symbolic payment? Dolto distinguished between a symbolic payment from the child (e.g., a stamp, a pebble) and the money paid for the session by the parents or the state. According to her, it was important to make the child bring this form of ‘payment’ as a sign of their engagement in the work, but also for them to be able to express that they did not desire to be ‘helped’, did not want the treatment. Dolto was very clear about the fact that a child’s symptom was always a necessary and valuable solution, meaning that sometimes was a problem for others, but not for him. In other words, being able to refuse treatment was a question of the child’s freedom.

• In our experience, in offering a ‘free’ service, there is always an element of trying to saturate some frustration rather than letting it speak. Also, does it make a difference in how one feels ‘welcome’ when one pays? What version of ‘free’ do we want to advocate? Is it the version of ‘free’ as ‘free of charge’, or rather Dolto’s emphasis on freedom, a freedom that always requires an engagement, i.e., that always has to be, in one way or another, paid for – or rejected?

2) Anonymity

Anonymity has also been one of the fundamental values of welcoming in Maison Verte since its conception.

• It has a particular value in this space – it is a bracketing of the adults’ social identity, while the child’s intimate identity (their given name) is not only asked for but inscribed. This particular kind of anonymity does not mean that we remain strangers; quite the contrary, it helps us welcome each child in his or her singularity and, as much as possible, without preconceptions.

• Anonymity also has to do with the fact that one does not need to formulate a demand, as we think of it in analysis, in order to attend. Parents are not expected to justify their coming to Bubble & Speak because of a ‘problem’ or a symptom.

• By writing down the child’s rather than parent’s name on the board, we mark the priority of children in our space. Sometimes parents can be quite surprised by this: Dolto used to say that this was perhaps because adults sometimes realised that they themselves as children were “talked about rather than talked to”, that they were not treated as subjects.

• The administrative anonymity serves to protect the space from a certain kind of social gaze, creating conditions for a freer space of exchange and guaranteeing that nothing will be transmitted to anyone, any person or institution.

• The families only come when they want to, and sometimes an ad-hoc visit can precisely be an opportunity to ‘leave’ something behind. This also means that when we receive someone, it is in the here-and-now.

• It is increasingly difficult to maintain an anonymous space in today’s data-driven environment. The difficulties we have encountered mostly revolve around 1) funding, which is conditioned on collecting some kind of data about our ‘users’, 2) safeguarding, where the lack of formal information we hold poses a challenge to the legal requirement to intervene in cases of suspected abuse or neglect.