Five professionals connected in various ways with the William Alanson White Institute have produced this book. Two are Neil Altman and Jay Frankel, editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues: A Journal of Relational Perspectives. Their purpose is to study child therapy from an interpersonal and relational psychoanalytic perspective. Their book attempts to conceptualize that treatment. It succeeds, it seems to me, not only in presenting that point of view but in being helpful to any child psychoanalytic psychotherapist.

Written for those working with children up to around the beginning of puberty, the book describes effectively the complexity of the child's world. Chapter 11, one of the best clinically relevant chapters of the book, is titled “Launching the Therapy with the Child.” The authors quote E. Loewald (1987): “in beginning to work with a child the therapist