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Many years ago, perusing the stacks of the Erik Erikson Library in the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, I came upon a small publication, a little monograph from the New York Review of Books called Teaching the “Unteachable” (Kohl 1967). It is the story of a young man, teaching in an impoverished area of New York City, who threw out the book and began to listen to his students, to ask them to write their own thoughts, about their own lives, and to read what they wrote. Herbert Kohl is not a psychoanalyst, rather, an educator, but he happened on one of the principles on which clinical psychoanalysis is founded: we all need to be seen and reflected in the eyes and mind of the other in order to know ourselves (Winnicott 1971; Fonagy and Target 1996). I thought often of Herbert Kohl's small book of children's writings as I read Michael O'Loughlin's rich and complex collection of work from a host of visionary practitioners of applied psychoanalysis, who each in their own way use their psychoanalytic training and thinking to better the lives of children, from the Outback of Australia to the U.K., France, and the U.S.
This collection ranges from clinicians whose work with parents draws on all of their clinical and theoretical resources (Donna Wolf-Palacio, Carola Chase) to program builders (Leon Hoffman et al., Norma Tracey) who, like the composer of a symphony, hold all of the players in mind (administrators, educators, parents, and most of all children) as they work to make their vision of the pragmatic yet sophisticated psychoanalytic work that is possible with children in the bricks-and-mortar world. I found it helpful in my reading to think of the contributions as loosely organized around two areas: clinical work, recognizable to any psychoanalyst practicing today, and work on the theory and practice of education. Throughout, however, these authors make strong arguments for truth