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This is an innovative volume of work based on clinical experiences of psychotherapy with 80 children and adolescents in the care system. The approach is fresh and revealing. It is accessible to a broad range of people and will widen the horizons and deepen the understanding of those who read it.
The Introduction states the aim as follows:
I have written this book to demonstrate how therapy may be made viable. Because in wanting to help children whose faith in adults is slim, whose experience of adults is dire and whose cynicism is often entrenched and well founded, therapists have to communicate in a way that might reach these individuals.
This is a bold objective as all those who have worked with this challenging group of extremely vulnerable children will know. To say the least, they are a ‘hard to reach’ population.
There are many points that I could use to illustrate the book's strengths, but I shall mention only a few. The author presents her ideas largely through describing brief vignettes of her encounters with those referred for therapy to a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS). She uses evocative, descriptive narratives and then gives some theoretical elaboration of the themes that emerge. The language is straightforward and easily grasped, despite using some sophisticated concepts to help the reader learn about the theoretical background to her ideas. As well as providing a framework on some key concepts in psychoanalytic child psychotherapy in the introduction, there is a useful glossary of terms at the end. The book stimulates the reader's appetite for learning about mental pain/anxiety and defences against it, interpretation and containment, the role of play, attunement and maternal reverie, the therapist's state of mind and the importance of personal analysis and training. The author states at the outset that classical ‘rules’ of maintaining therapeutic neutrality might sometimes need to be broken and technique modified when working