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Barbara Piovano is a child neuro-psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, a Member of the Societá Italiana di Psicoanalisi. In this book, translated into English four years after its original publication, she presents the historical, theoretical and methodological development of her work in the Centro Medico Psico-Pedagogico in Rome, a service in the public sector for the diagnosis and treatment of psychopathology in children and adolescents.
In the first two chapters, which are of historical interest, she traces the developments and the changes in the service, which provides a multi-disciplinary approach to the treatment of children, referred primarily for neurological problems. Piovano also traces her own personal and professional development, when she shows that, from her earlier neuro-psychiatric approach, she moved progressively towards a more classical psychoanalytic framework, focusing on the interpersonal and relational disturbances of the children and, a fortiori, of their families.
When she stops and reflects on the changes in the patient population and reasons for referral over the seven years spanned by her work, the reader becomes aware that, when the staff began to provide a psychoanalytically informed therapeutic setting, this in turn created the demand for the treatment of psychopathology and developmental arrest, rather than neurological disorders. Although she does not explicitly state this, it is nonetheless evident that she is talking about the results of outreach work, which has enabled the service to reach a specific patient population that can benefit from psychoanalytical psychotherapy.
Piovano shows, through the richness of her clinical material, how severely disturbed autistic, borderline and psychotic children and adolescents have successfully been treated by the centre, using the method of parallel psychotherapy with children and parents. In Chapter 3 she formulates the rationale for introducing the novel methodology of the parallel treatment of