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When my children were “children,” I chose not to see patients the same ages as they—I thought of it as not having the quality or quantity of energy for certain things that both my children and my patients might need or want. After all, how many games of Yahtze can one play in a day and really “play?” How many hours can an adult spend playing the squiggle game, or building with Legos, or ….? And so, without the benefit of a theoretical perspective on what I was doing, I came to some reckoning between what I deemed the essential parts of my therapist and my parent selves. With my idiosyncratic concerns about being able to access parts of myself for each and all of the children in my day, and a conscious commitment that their developmental needs would dictate how I would try to be available, I drew a firm albeit perhaps arbitrary boundary. Of course, this intentional reckoning was based upon my own childhood experiences, rationalizations (after all, I don’t like Yahtze at all, so if I was going to have to play it…..), etc., but it seems to me now to have been an implicit recognition of my experience of being an essential playmate to both my children and my patients.
Steven Tuber’s edited volume Parenting: Contemporary Clinical Perspectives takes his reader closer to an understanding of significant aspects of parenting through the lens of oscillations that we as clinicians—and not only as child clinicians—experience consciously or not consciously, in the essential to relevant continuum that he outlines so clearly in the first chapter. Inviting a group of psychoanalytic clinicians, many of whom are also scholars and teachers, to write about their experiences of parenting, Tuber elicited a dozen chapters that range in form from standard “journal” contributions, to essays, to personal musings. Reading the book is like attending a well-constructed conference: Tuber’s opening chapter as the Keynote Address, setting the foundation underlying a series of presentations that do n