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, by Anne Alvarez, London, Routledge, 2012, 214 pp., £85 (hardback), £23.99 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-415-55486-2 (hb), 978-0-415-55487-9 (pb)
This is an account of what that often empty bureaucratic phrase ‘life-long learning’ might really mean if pursued with diligence, intelligence and courage. It allows the reader to share in the fruits of a life time of learning and disciplined thinking. Anne Alvarez is now in a position to look back on different stages in her professional practice and the patients who challenged her. A committed psychoanalytic psychotherapist and, latterly, a clinician-researcher, Alvarez has always taken an imaginative and critical stance towards psychoanalytic theory, seeking to integrate different perspectives within psychoanalysis with the ideas that have been emerging from developmental psychology and neuroscience. Linked together, these perspectives on normal development and psychopathology helped her observe and think about the states of being she encountered in traumatised, withdrawn and autistic child patients, sustaining her in working with them over long periods. This book draws on clinical work, psychoanalytic theory, infant observation and infant research. It offers an account of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children that is both inspiring and daunting.
Anne Alvarez has been so influential within child psychotherapy for so long that it is difficult to think back to a time when the ideas she is describing here had not yet emerged. From the 1970s, child psychotherapists in the UK were feeling an increasing need to develop their way of working in response to the range and severity of difficulties among the children and adolescents presenting in public clinics and private consulting rooms. Alvarez has given a large part of her professional life to thinking and writing about the particular needs of traumatised and autistic child patients and the demands they make of clinicians.
In this book, as in her other writing, she returns to her