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.
This beautiful book is written from a lifetime experience of talking therapeutically with children and young people as well as teaching, supervising and reflecting on mind and body – often, Music tells us, whilst running. This is Graham Music’s third book in a fruitful decade and all three – The Good Life (2014) Nurturing Natures (2010/2017) and now Nurturing Children (2019) are informed by impressively wide scholarship and research, carefully metabolised with the psychotherapy practitioner, school-teacher, social worker and carer in mind.
Music draws from the fields of neuroscience, attachment research and a wealth of psychoanalytic theories of child and adult work – he generously makes the ‘bibliography’ one of the longest sections in the book. From the point of view of teaching psychotherapy, one of the satisfactions is the way in which Music links capacity for curiosity, open-mindedness and straightforward communication in the therapist with the ability to promote the process of human growth and repair in the child. An evocation of the classic psychoanalytic value of working through in the countertransference is provided in the introduction: ‘… part of my role was to process in myself feelings that he [the child] knew all too well. I needed to know from the inside what he had suffered …’ (p. 6). Immersing oneself further in the book’s lucid prose provides the reader with a capacity for thinking and linking in Bion’s sense of the term, with which ‘Stuart’, a dysregulated and traumatised boy, signs off his long treatment: ‘… two thoughts together, not easy to do’ (p. 67).
Music’s belief that human infants are essentially altruistic, cooperative and moral (in contrast to Piaget’s model of ego-centric beginnings) is put to a severe test by the psychopathic, sadistic, deeply withdrawn and damaged children who visit his consulting room. I appreciate a book that makes nuanced and sophisticated distinctions between different types of early adversity, and the range of diff