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The novelist Colum McCann once reflected that: “Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be” (2009, p. A21). One reason for this rests with their benefit of buttressing identity with a certain coherence and stability. However we create our pasts will have a direct bearing upon the way we sculpt our future. As therapists and analysts, we try to rupture the old narrative to make a new future possible. The investigation of the story in a person's therapy is a watershed moment, for it is here where the patient may open up to his other, less conscious selves.
Steven Tuber and Jane Caflisch's new book, Starting Treatment with Children and Adolescents: A Process-Oriented Guide for Therapists, is a refreshing primer for the beginning child therapist who, by virtue of her trade, must become an aficionado of the story as it expresses itself through a child's play or the adolescent's more sophisticated stories. Such fresh advances can come with their own excitement at putting ideas and feelings together on a deeper level as well as discomfort in feeling the stretch of a new reach.
Dr. Steven Tuber, the senior author, is a professor of psychology at The City University of New York's clinical doctoral program. Ms. Caflisch is a doctoral student in this program and a therapist in training at the Psychological Center at CUNY. Their book was generated by a doctoral-level practicum course that focused on the process of child psychotherapy that Dr. Tuber has taught at CUNY for the past 25 years. From over 200 audiotaped transcripts of therapy sessions conducted by student therapists that were presented in Dr. Tuber's course over the years, 12 session transcripts were selected and used to form the foundation for each chapter. These sessions were culled “… from a beginning therapist's first ten sessions with a child patient” (p. ix). The volume's primary purpose is to serve as a guidebook of sorts to the beginning professional's