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Emphasizing “know-how applied to procedures and techniques” rather than theory of therapy, Adam's book is primarily a working manual for beginners in child psychotherapy. But fortunately much of his ideology of psychotherapy shines through. He forewarns the reader that his orientation is “interpersonal [largely Sullivanian], both behavioral and dynamic, eclectic, and a bit radical sociopolitically [p. vii].” As those introductory words suggest, the book is pungent, lucid, and somewhat idiosyncratic in tone and content. For example, Adams comments that
we want to know the mind of the child because we cannot know it. We are impelled to fathom what we cannot fathom and to search for the devices that we have lost irretrievably. Discrete, critical moments—sudden flashes—comprised our own childhood, our temps perdu, and it is just these same imponderable flukes of existence which make up the childhood of our offspring and of our patients. To work with children assuredly is to live with unforeseeable and unequilibrated flukes [p. 10].