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This is a valuable book for child analysis students, child psychiatrists, therapists and educators. It is essentially a collection of papers by well-known child analysts outlining the basic principles of child analytic assessment and technique with pre-latency, latency and pre-adolescent children, and discussing some applications of these principles to psychotherapy and educational approaches.
The editors felt that an updated book on technique was needed, and
Glenn himself contributes some excellent articles in the first four parts of the book which provide a lucid exposition of general principles and the theory underlying them. The editors are particularly to be commended for their emphasis on providing clear clinical vignettes to illustrate the principles put forward, since it is often this translation from theory to the clinical material which is most problematical.
There are good chapters by Kramer and Byerly and by Wieder, describing the ways in which technique has to be tailored to the different levels of psychosexual and ego maturity. Wieder emphasises the special anxieties and resistances to treatment of the pre-adolescent which require careful understanding and patience by the analyst. Throughout there is a focus on the slow and careful work of defence analysis, with clear and vivid examples of the unfolding interpretative process. There are also beautifully clear examples given to illustrate the complex issues of diagnostic assessment and treatment choice in papers by Bernstein, Sax and Furman, and in Silverman's chapter on the value of Anna Freud's Diagnostic Profile.
In “Aspects of the Analytic Process” (Part Five) there are interesting papers dealing with the opening phase of treatment (Neubauer) and the issue of gifts, gratification and frustration (Kay). Two long case examples give an honest account of the problems these issues pose for child analysts, and a vivid picture of how their handling was crucial to the establishment of a therapeutic alliance