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This is an excellent book. Tuber and Caflisch present us with “a process-oriented guide” aimed for beginning child therapists and their supervisors, but it will be valuable too for more experienced child therapists as well as adult therapists. The book has an unusual format: theoretical rationale is presented in only a three-page Preface, a 19-page Introduction, and a three-page Conclusion, which sandwich 271 pages of child therapy session transcripts including supervisory comments. Such detail is very rare in published clinical material and allows the reader to see how the authors' ideas come to life in actual clinical moments—much as happens during good supervision. The child patients range in age from 9 to 14. One topic very important to beginning child therapists that the authors do not discuss is parent work. The authors simply explain that that was not their focus; this is a book about beginning process between therapist and child. A companion book by the same authors on parent work would be very welcome.
Although the book is coauthored, the authors describe their collaboration as a process of thinking through the clinical material with Caflisch taking the supervisee's point of view, and Tuber the supervisor's. The theoretical viewpoints and supervisory comments are presented by Tuber in the first person. Therefore, in this review I will hereafter refer to “Tuber” rather than “the authors.”
Tuber uses the brief theoretical sections to very clearly present his rationale for the goal of beginning child therapy: to develop a framework in which the child can become more psychologically minded. Tuber states that this approach is based on three conceptual models that are “in his bones”: recent work by Fonagy and colleagues on mentalizing and reflective functioning; Winnicottian theory on the capacity to play, transitional space, and the development of self and other; and ego psychological concepts about the dynamic relationships between affect, drive, and defense. Tub