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This is an unusual and potentially groundbreaking book. Psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy has tended to be reluctant to embrace the world of evidence-based and manualized treatments. Partly in consequence of this, in many countries psychoanalysis has been in danger of losing its place as a treatment of choice in the public sector and being relegated to a therapeutic backwater. With this volume, Leon Hoffman and his colleagues have attempted to reclaim some of this lost ground by devising a manualized form of treatment that remains true to psychoanalytic principles yet which can be researched, easily replicated, taught, and delivered in the manner of other manualized treatments. Furthermore, the target patient group of this therapy is one that often causes the most consternation among professionals, parents, and other significant adults in a child's life. These are children who manifest externalizing behaviors, and who often are diagnosed as ADHD, or sometimes oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) or at worst, conduct disorder (CD).
The book is brought even further up the hierarchy of contemporary relevance with its clear delineation of the links between aspects of contemporary neuroscience research and psychodynamic psychotherapy, in particular with externalizing children who struggle with issues of executive functioning and emotional regulation.
The therapy, regulation-focused psychotherapy for children (RFP-C), is designed to help therapists work with such children who struggle to manage their emotions. Hoffman, Rice, and Prout deftly steer a path through much contemporary psychological discourse and debate while never losing grip of his central psychoanalytic principles and beliefs. This sidesteps a problem for contemporary psychoanalysis, which, in the face of the barrage of neurobiological and attachment research, has often struggled to find a common language with such therapeutic and psychological discourses. Thus, there has been little genuine communic