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.
In recent years, child and adolescent psychotherapy has been dominated by the development of new techniques. Although this is especially true of cognitive-behavioral interventions, psychoanalytically informed research in child therapy has also attempted to develop more refined techniques to promote, for example, improved mentalization (Zevalkink, Verheugt-Pleiter, & Fonagy, 2012) and emotion regulation (Hoffman, Rice, & Prout, 2016). In many respects, this is a salutary development, and these therapeutic advances have been helpful to many children and families.
Psychotherapy, however, cannot be reduced to a set of techniques. Effective clinical work with children and adolescents requires a creative adaptation and responsiveness to the individuality of each patient. From beginning to end, at every phase of the therapeutic process, child and adolescent psychotherapy remains a therapeutic art.
In this small volume of case studies (Kronengold prefers to call them short stories) Henry Kronengold teaches the art of child and adolescent therapy. All child and adolescent therapists, of every theoretical orientation, should read this book. It should be read by beginning child therapists early in their training and by experienced therapists, when our creativity needs to be renewed and when we need to reflect again on the many roles we come to play in the lives of our child and adolescent patients. The stories Kronengold tells are memorable, each in its own way. Beginning therapists will remember them when they face similar clinical problems as, inevitably, they will.
The tension between art and science, creativity and technique, is present in all psychotherapy but is especially apparent in therapy with children and adolescents, who so often insist that we engage with them on their terms and convey our understanding in less than straightforward ways. Even behavioral and cognitive-behavioral therapists, whose therapeutic models focus on reinforcement and teaching cognitive skills,