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This slim volume contains updated versions of papers presented at a 2019 conference on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis1 plus some later papers that address the impact of subsequent events (especially COVID-19) upon our field. The editors open their book with a foreword by Florence Guignard, the past chair of the International Psychoanalytic Association’s (IPA) Committee on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis. Guignard notes major external events currently affecting all children and adolescents: viral pandemics, climate degradation, and the dislocation of millions of impoverished families. To these stressors she adds the impact of the internet upon the experience of puberty – a flood of unmodulated information and disinformation complicating how adolescents experience their own changing bodies and minds and the world around them.
The authors come from Argentina, Brazil, France, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Kleinian, Winnicottian, neo-Kleinian, and Bionian perspectives predominate – a challenging smorgasbord of theory and clinical practice. I will highlight those papers I found most valuable and then raise some questions about others.
Björn Salmonsson’s description of parent-infant psychotherapy is inspiring. While many of the other authors in this collection interpret phantasies, Salmonsson prefers to speak to the affects that he observes and intuits in infants and their mothers, an approach that seems “limbic” rather than theory driven. In his work with Tina, a three-month-old girl, and her mother, Nathalie, he describes
… a procedure in which a therapist addresses a patient about his or her unconscious intentions and fantasies. The aim is to help her become acquainted with them and connect them with other aspects of her person, life history, and present relationships. The clinician also conveys commitment, attention, and a non-judgemental attitude. This double helix of promoting insight and