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.
I was very pleased to be asked to review this book for several reasons. Kerry and Jack Novick have consistently made important contributions to our profession and they present their ideas in a clear well thought out manner. It is always a pleasure to read their books and articles and to listen to their presentations. But this book had a very special appeal for me, because in 1995 when I set out to write a book on this same subject, my search of the literature produced very few articles. I was shocked that this important aspect of a child therapist's work was so seriously neglected in the literature. Approaching this uncharted territory was daunting at first, but then I realized that my own work with parents, combined with my theoretical knowledge, was enough to begin and I did. Working with Parents: Establishing the Essential Alliance in Child Psychotherapy and Consultation was published in 1997. Since then, some articles and presentations on the therapist's work with the parents of child patients have begun to appear. A particularly fine one by Arietta Slade called Working with Parents in Child Psychotherapy: Engaging the Reflective Function, is soon to be published in a 2006 issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. However, the Novicks are, to my knowledge, the only other authors of an entire book that addresses work with the parents of children in treatment in depth and detail, using a psychoanalytic developmental framework.
The Novicks' book is divided into 11 chapters, beginning with a very interesting review of the history of the place of parents in child analysis. They trace and describe various attitudes of analysts toward the parents