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At first sight, to review these three books together is a daunting endeavour. The first is by a member of the UK Association of Child Psychotherapists (ACP) and focuses on treating childhood trauma; the second is also by an ACP member who has been one of the pioneers of direct work with infants and their parents in the UK; and the third is a small edited book of papers about child analysis. Although they all address psychoanalytic work with children, they are curiously different and as such reflect the complexity of the child psychoanalytic field in the UK today.
From an historical perspective, this field has several dimensions, not solely the vagaries of theoretical and personal politics that are so clearly described by Rodriguez de la Sierra. The great pioneers of this work: Melanie Klein, Anna Freud and Donald W. Winnicott, are well known to the psychoanalytic community worldwide, as are the traditions they wittingly or unwittingly spawned. These, until very recently, also provided the political structure through which the theoretical traditions were bequeathed to ongoing generations of psychoanalysts in the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) and beyond. However, in UK child psychoanalytic work, institutional aspects have other meanings and influences, and indeed on the ongoing extension and creativity of the field. This is one of the most interesting aspects when reading these three books together: the view they give of where the creative edge is in psychoanalytic work with children today.
I use the phrase ‘psychoanalytic work with children’, not ‘the psychoanalysis of children’, to reflect the breadth of the perspective I believe needs to be taken in appraising the situation with regard to this group, at least in the UK. I do not know the situation very well in other countries. It might also be the case in relation to work with adults, but that is for another time perhaps. For it has to be acknowledged that for some considerable time most of this work has be