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Jack and Kerry Kelly Novick, along with Denia and Thomas Barrett and an international group of child and adolescent psychoanalysts, have given us two unique and important books on the psychoanalytic treatment of children and adolescents. Both Casebooks present detailed therapeutic work, followed by commentaries and editorial reflections. All of the therapists and discussants are anonymous, ensuring greater confidentiality and allowing more in-depth descriptions of the therapeutic process.
The Parent Work Casebook is devoted to work with parents of children and adolescents. The Casebook argues, as a central premise, for the importance of working with parents for successful child therapy. The volume succeeds in this goal. The cases convincingly demonstrate the importance of parent work.
The Casebook is informed by several therapeutic principles, discussed in previous publications by the Novicks (Working With Parents Makes Therapy Work; Freedom to Choose; Novick & Novick, 2005, 2016). The book begins with a statement of two fundamental goals of child and adolescent therapy: (1) “restoration of the child to the path of progressive development” and (2) “restoration of the parent-child relationship to a life-long constructive resource for both.” The editors briefly describe the “two systems of self-regulation” model of emotional development (Novick & Novick, 2016). Successful therapy promotes a “shift from a predominantly closed system power struggle to open-system function, based on cooperation, mutuality, respect, and love.” This important contribution to clinical theory deserves more widespread recognition and more frequent use in clinical work.
The cases present a variety of kinds of parent work. The analysts are faced with some of our most common, yet also most difficult, clinical dilemmas - parents whose actions threaten the continuation of treatment; how to maintain a therapeutic alliance with parents whose relationship is relentlessly adversarial