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After a recent session with a particularly nonverbal boy whose highly repetitive play once more dominated our time together, I began to put my toys away. In the quiet of my office as I crammed toys for the umpteenth time into my toy cabinet, I entertained a thought that may, perhaps, be familiar to others who work with children. “If only I had new toys, then things would be different,” I mused to myself. Who doesn’t have a Barbie whose once styled hair fresh out of the package has been tangled past its prime, or a Matchbox car with one missing wheel that you just can’t bring yourself to throw away, or a Spiderman so heavily used that its paint has been worn off? I imagined that the novelty of new toys somehow would provide the nudge that would move this boy and our play into a fluid momentum that would reassure me of the presence of vitality, growth, even what we might acknowledge as development. A resumption of some form of developmental flow is at least part of what we seek when we work with children, is it not? But how do we get there? What does such a resumption look like? Do I really need to replace my stock of Barbie dolls?
In Developmental Perspectives in Child Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, thoughtfully edited and assembled into a compelling tapestry of papers by Christopher Bonovitz, Psy.D., and Andrew Harlem, Ph.D., Bonovitz and Harlem remind us that at the heart of a developmental perspective is not a need for new toys, but the idea, even the experience, of multiplicity (2018). Multiplicity has richly infused our present clinical and theoretical moment unlike any other time in the history of child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Far from an insistence on orthodoxy, this book implicitly asserts that there is precious value in seeing that a theoretical and clinical perspective that embraces multiplicity allows what is important developmentally to emerge. In the spirit of multiplicity, this is a book distinguishes itself through its many impressively dis