You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This publication coincided with Juliet Hopkins’ 80th birthday in 2015 and is a collection of 12 papers gathered together into four sections: work with trauma; attachment theory; infant–parent psychotherapy; integrating and exploring Winnicott. The opportunity to read this book leads me to recommend it heartily as more than a sum of its parts, although I imagine that clinicians will dip in and out of it as needed. With a clear structure, it is an accessible collection that showcases Hopkins’ friendly intelligence and innovative insights analogous to the clinical companionship of an intuitive and encouraging supervisor. The evocative case studies readily connect with the day-to-day clinical encounters of child and adolescent psychotherapists and highlight the valuable learning that is offered by practice-based evidence. Hopkins’ clinical intuition, deep interest in her patients coupled with a facility with words opens up complex insights and extension of ideas succinctly, clearly and usefully. For example in one of Hopkins’ much cited papers, ‘Solving the mystery of monsters’ (1986), she discusses the centrality of containment in the recovery from trauma:
Many traumatised children entering psychotherapy are unready and unable to confront their past. They may benefit from spending long periods in which they communicate their inchoate and unprocessed experience through compulsive repetition in the here-and-now. It is the therapist’s capacity to tolerate, contain and process these negative experiences without joining the dance of rejection, retaliation, humiliation and helplessness that enables children to move beyond the need for re-enactment and to discover that relationships with adults are less frightening than they had believed. Perhaps Freud (1909) was right to suppose that ghosts of the past can never fully rest until they have been understood, but meanwhile the therapist’s capacity for containment can reduce the pressure to repeat the past and so allow new relati