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Child analytic work is multi-faceted and intensely pragmatic. It involves many parties (parents, stepparents, siblings, teachers, schools, and government agencies) and many techniques. In addition to the use of transference, countertransference, dreams, and reconstruction, there is also
developmental assistance and much use of displacement. The path toward insight may proceed via pretend play, drawings, and games and at times, scarcely symbolic nonverbal enactments, representing very early developmental levels.
I review these two volumes from the point of view of a child and adolescent analyst and as a student and teacher of psychoanalysis. Our field is broad, almost unfathomable, encompassing the past, the present, the anticipated future, and the moving target of development.
The two volumes Parent Work Casebook and Adolescent Casebook are structured similarly. Each chapter describes an assessment and a treatment, usually over several years’ time. The narrative of each child or adolescent’s treatment is followed by three discussions: two by commentators and one by the editors.
Reading these books is a veritable education in both development and analytic technique. The authors represent symptoms as they arise from phase-related conflicts and portray the effects of past traumas on current developmental challenges. The authors delineate how social and bodily developments initiate, interweave with, and sometimes inhibit psychic growth. There is careful and detailed reporting of how the analyst brings up the psychological aspects of bodily and interpersonal development with children and their parents.
I highly recommend Parent Work Casebook and Adolescent Casebook to all psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. To adult analysts and therapists, I remark that all patients have had parents, retaining the character resulting from those early and ongoing relationships. All adult patients, of course, were adolescents, and retain the solutions to the challenges of sexuality, ident