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.
LYNNE MCCALLISTER'S BEAUTIFULLY DETAILED ACCOUNT OF HER four year psychotherapy with Annie and her adoptive mother provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to learn about therapeutic process with a very young, traumatized child. Through rich clinical example, McCallister's presentation delineates both the methods utilized and some of the core premises upon which the treatment is based. Dr. McCallister describes the gradual emergence of her patients' sense of safety through the development of a secure “holding environment,” and shares with us the evolution of her symbolic play, which is used as a medium through which Annie can communicate her most powerful fears and reflect her developing maturity. Implicit in McCallister's work is the importance she gives to the role of reconstruction of early memories in psychotherapy. She states explicitly her belief that her work with her young patient involves the “integration” of Annie's emergent pre-verbal memories—an important aspect of the treatment, and one to which she ascribes much therapeutic efficacy. Here Dr. McCallister takes a definitive position on some long-standing controversial issues. The first relates to the question of what in the work, is therapeutic; in particular, the significance of the “re-integration” of “memories” to therapeutic success. The second, which is the basis
upon which re-integration may occur, relates to the nature of memory in a young child and, indeed, the capacity of the child to remember events from pre-verbal periods. The third, touches upon the issue of the attribution of meaning to symbolic material emerging in treatment, in particular at a developmental stage that is later than the occurrence of the presumed trauma. Citing the work of neurobiologists and clinicians in the field of trauma, upon whose research and theories she fashions this treatment (Terr, 1988, Schore, 1994, Gaensbauer, 1995 and Siegel, 1999), Dr. McCallister works to help her now verbal, young pa