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Working with Parents Makes Therapy Work is a rare book. It is a book on a subject that is almost never written about in psychoanalysis, even though its subject matter, working with parents, is one of the most commonly encountered aspects of treating child patients. The reasons for this void in the literature have always been difficult to explain. In their opening chapter Kerry Kelly and Jack Novick address child analysts' long-standing resistance to working with parents and their even greater reluctance to theorizing about that work. This is also a rare book for another reason: while it makes no extravagant claims, it quietly turns the traditional way of thinking about parent work in child analysis on its head. For this reason especially, all child analysts should read it and consider its message.
Let me begin with a caveat. This is a book you certainly can't “tell by its cover”; that is, it is a book that is somewhat difficult to appreciate at first. To begin with, the authors seem deliberately to avoid the question of whether they are talking about psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, although it becomes clear that what they have to say has relevance to both. In fact, all the clinical material seems to be analytic material, which is welcome news for child analysts. In addition, the organizational style and format of the book, including its rather pedestrian-sounding chapter headings (Evaluation, Beginning Phase, Middle Phase, etc.) conjures a handbook in which the information threatens to be rudimentary or formulaic. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
The authors present a multitude of short clinical cases that become increasingly complex. The sheer number of cases impresses the reader with the depth of the authors' combined clinical experience. Often cases are mentioned in a truncated form, to be revisited later in the book