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Psychotherapy with infants and young children – repairing the effects of stress and trauma on early attachments, by Alicia F. Lieberman and Patricia Van Horn, New York and London, The Guilford Press, 2008, 366 pp. £24.30, ISBN 978-1-59385-675-5
Alicia Lieberman's work first came to my attention when searching for a book on the emotional life of the toddler (Lieberman, 1993). She is also co-author of
‘Infant–parent psychotherapy’, a chapter in the Handbook of Infant Mental Health (2000), edited by Charles Zeanah. Alicia Lieberman is Irving B. Harris Professor of Infant Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, and Director of the Child Trauma Research Project at San Francisco General Hospital. Patricia Van Horn is respectively Associate Clinical Professor and Associate Director in each setting.
The scene is set with the opening dedication to Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby ‘who provided our attachment lens’, and to Selma Fraiberg and Bill Harris ‘who gave us the secure base to integrate them’. Psychotherapy with Infants and Young Children describes a model of work which is therefore informed by both attachment theory and psychoanalytic concepts, and which the authors call ‘child–parent psychotherapy’, or CPP for short. The book is aimed at an American readership and the emphasis is on relation-based treatment for mental health problems of infancy and early childhood, with a particular focus on attachment and primary emotional relationships. As is the practice in the Tavistock model of under fives’ counselling in this country, the infant or child is included in the therapeutic conversation. The book includes chapters on assessment, on the implementation of CPP in cases of varying degrees of severity, on working with the wider network around the family and on the breakdown of the therapeutic relationship. The autho