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This is a very ambitious book, in at least two ways. First, the authors set out to demonstrate the legitimacy, validity, and effectiveness of working on parenting from both clinical and research perspectives. I confess to pleasure and pride in their endeavor, given that, only 20 years ago, when Jack Novick and I published our book on working with parents of child and adolescent patients (Novick and Novick 2005), very little such work was done or discussed, and there were almost no theoretical or technical models for it. In his excellent foreword to this volume Peter Fonagy (the godfather of the mentalizing approach) asserts unequivocally the demonstrated importance of addressing issues of parenting in all clinical domains as a way to break the cycle of intergenerational transmission of pathology. Second, in a long and quite dense text, the authors seek to explicate a particular theoretical approach, suggest techniques they derive from it, and apply their ideas to parenting work at all ages. That is a lot to encompass.
In this brief review, I hope to convey the strengths of this volume and raise a few questions for readers to consider. I start with a central problematic, unspoken in the text but pervasive throughout, which is the relation of this “mentalization-based” approach to the complex existing corpus of psychoanalytic developmental and clinical models. This issue is larger than this particular book, but affects how we can most usefully assimilate what the authors offer. The authors draw almost exclusively upon the growing interdisciplinary developmental literature to bolster and explicate their ideas, apparently choosing to omit almost any references to relevant and familiar psychoanalytic concepts that I find necessary and often
sufficient to the task of understanding a particular clinical moment and guiding technical interventions. Of 280 cited references, only 14% to 15% are from psychoanalytic books or journals or address psychoanalytic ideas. This decis