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One consequence of the rise of alternative treatments to analytic therapy for children is, in my view, a change in the type of patient referred to child therapists and analysts. These children tend to show quite extreme disturbances in affective and impulse control and significant impairment in interpersonal relations. The parent often seems as unable to cope with the child as the teacher. Hard to engage or communicate with, withholding of affection or clingy and demanding, painfully inhibited or extremely aggressive—these types of children were often not considered for analytic treatment because they were seen as unable to use the analytic experience, one devoted to the interpretation of conflict. Looking through the prism of developmental therapy with its emphasis on the relational, the possibilities are opened up. Why this should be and how it works in clinical practice is addressed by the contributors to Psychoanalysis and Developmental Therapy, a slim collection of papers edited by Anne Hurry, which deserves a wide audience.
The book's contributors have all been associated in some way with the Anna Freud Centre. Peter Fonagy and Mary Target open the first of the book's three sections with a review of the influence of current research on the parent-infant relationship and on how information gained about this interrelation may influence clinical practice. In the second section, five cases are discussed in terms of developmental therapy. And in the final two chapters, collaborative work in the treatment of developmental disturbance is outlined.
A fundamental question for the reader to ask is, Does the book succeed at demonstrating how a “new” approach may succeed better than an “old” approach? Hurry acknowledges, “Child analysts have always used such techniques as helping a child to be able to play, to name feelings, to control wishes and impulses rather than be driven to enact them, to relate to others and to think of and see others as thinking