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There is a deficit in the field of child therapy around psychodynamic and developmental texts that are accessible to trainees—as well as busy clinicians interested in broadening their practice. This was evident to me as a child psychiatry trainee 15 years ago and remains so now. As a coteacher of a course on psychodynamic psychotherapy with children and teens for child psychiatry fellows, we often must cobble together reading resources for our students. There are many and myriad articles touching on elements of what we teach, but these are often historically dated, anachronistic in other respects, or simply too narrow in their focus. Conversely, survey texts tend to be biologically or cognitively driven, and where more psychodynamic themes are included, these tend to be somewhat cursory and terse (Dulcan 2022; ). This particular historical moment is marked by multiple countervailing forces that we often see in our trainees: a biological orientation and inherited skepticism toward classical psychoanalytic language, yet a thirst to understand the very particular meanings that patients' presentations may represent, and the language and theory necessary for work that goes beyond symptom management and remission.
As most who work dynamically or analytically with kids and teens are aware, doing treatment necessarily rests on a developmental understanding of where the child has been, currently is, and appears headed toward. Because no child develops in a vacuum, thinking developmentally necessarily requires thinking dynamically: attending to the patterns of their interpersonal relationships as reflective and constitutive of the child's intrapsychic life. While I have not run into a trainee who stands opposed
to such an abstract orientation, problems arise once one begins talking about the “what” and “how” of dynamic thinking. Because of the stigma that became attached to psychodynamic theory over the later decades of the 20th century—some of which is based on reasonable