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This collection is remarkable in a number of respects. Its clinical clarity will allow any therapist in contact with psychotic children to ‘recognise’ himself in the situations described and to understand the psychic processes involved in the relationship forged between the child and the adult treating that child. Precise and concrete, the book covers every aspect of the material setting of the treatment. The classical setting is in fact found to be very distinctively modified; for instance, the reader is surprised to discover that, contrary to certain received ideas about the conduct of such treatments in the United Kingdom, most of the patients discussed have one or at most two sessions a week (and not four or five as often suggested in the international literature on the subject).
This clinical collection comprises a total of thirteen case histories of children who are either psychotic or near-autistic. In each case the patient's general situation and the unfolding of the treatment as a whole are presented, after which a number of fragments of sessions are described in detail, enabling the reader to follow step by step the therapist's feelings, thoughts, affects and routes to the creation of interpretations. This, then, is a fine and important book, whose authors have not shied away from self-revelation in the living process of their countertransference—with all its ups and downs and its constant demand for the application of thought to what has been felt.
The book is divided into three parts, each corresponding to a different aetiology. The first deals with abused children (including incest victims), while the second describes cases of children with suspected developmental delay. In the third part, while the quality of the accounts is in no way inferior, the overall profile is less clearly defined. As the authors say, this section covers disorders with both internal and external causes. But surely the family violence and developmental delay of the first two parts