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In his Foreword to this significant and comprehensive new book, psychologist Dan Hughes, who developed the family treatment dyadic development theory (Hughes, 2007) and whose PACE (playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, empathy) (Hughes, 2006) model is widely cited as a key therapeutic tool in the book, sets a tone: that this is a book for readers who are interested in how child psychotherapy can support an integration of the reflective, emotional, relational and physical developmental tasks of childhood.
Integrative child psychotherapy involves working with a deep sense of the child as a human body as well as a mind. The model also views therapy as an intersubjective
process, involving responsiveness and change in the therapist as well as the child, and demonstrates that a therapeutic relationship can help to heal a troubled mind.
The book shows us that integrative psychotherapy is not a ‘hodge-podge’ of different theories, deployed eclectically and in itself separate from other schools of child psychotherapy, particularly psychoanalysis. It is, rather, a way of working in which, by drawing on a number of key ideas and understanding, the therapist builds their own theoretical structure, and connects this with the needs of a particular child. As such, the model is inherently fluid and creative, rather than working to fit the work into an established structure imposed from outside. As psychotherapist Graham Music writes (in Chapter 1):
… while psychoanalysis is my ‘bedrock’ … my best work … happens when I am able to use my embodied countertransference as a sounding board, using neurobiologically informed understandings, including of the nervous system, alongside an understanding of attachment, and an awareness that the client's current ‘problems’ often developed as an adaptive way of coping with really difficult early experiences (p. 3).
Each of the book's 16 chapters is written by graduates of, or teachers on, the Institute for Arts and Therapy in Education (IATE) MA i