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A highly useful psychoanalytically informed contribution to our knowledge of psychic recovery and strength, this book reports on a creatively conceived psychodynamic research study and humanely conceived treatment of seriously compromised and traumatized children who went on to become very troubled and very difficult youngsters. It is especially praiseworthy for its aims and innovative strategies in presenting an insufficiently researched domain of prevention against illness and of healing from it—that is, on psychodynamic aspects of resilience in the face of harshly traumatizing early life experience.
The study of resilience began some fifty years ago. Its champions, however, have been surprisingly few, and it has been surprisingly marginalized in mental health disciplines, especially so in psychoanalysis. Individual clinicians have recognized that unique attributes contribute to “making it in life” or not making it, but have ascribed them to rather undefined capabilities or failures (e.g., Leon J. Saul [1947], Margaret S. Mahler, Erik Erikson, Robert Coles) and for a period some (e.g., E. James Anthony [1974]) have even spoken provocatively of children who are “invulnerable” (Michael Rutter [2000]). In this book Stuart Hauser, Joseph Allen, and Eve Golden