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Anne Alvarez is one of our most distinguished clinicians and has earned an international reputation for her work with severely disturbed children. The Thinking Heart is the culmination of her work spanning more than five decades. This book will be of interest not only to child therapists but adult therapists as well. Despite the tremendous erudition that is on display, the book is written in a modest and personal voice as Alvarez shares her failures and her mistakes along with her successes. In this respect, her book is a gift of great personal generosity to our field. The sheer charm and modesty of it helps the reader to get comfortable and enjoy entering into what are progressively more intricate and sophisticated discussions.
Alvarez notes at the outset of The Thinking Heart that children coming into treatment today are more disturbed and damaged than they were half a century ago, which is to say that they are more cognitively delayed and emotionally impoverished than was observed previously. Alvarez acknowledges that although many of these children are helped by traditional means, others are not, or are even made worse by the existing repertoire of intervention. Accordingly, she challenges us—gently but with acuity—to rethink our traditions and to consider afresh how we intervene. The Thinking Heart is a book for today's analytically oriented clinician, dealing with today's patients, trying to find out what will work, but also trying to understand what works and why in the context of a vast literature.
We have the right author for the task. Alvarez has spent decades working with children with particularly severe variants of autism, with abused children manifesting severe dissociation due to trauma, with children