Developmental Perspectives in Child Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Developmental Perspectives in Child Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy incorporates recent innovations in developmental theory into understanding the nature of change in child psychotherapy. Instead of relying on more traditional psychoanalytic theory, each contributor brings forth his or her own voice as they unfurl the ingredients of therapeutic action and its implications for their own style and approach.

The chapters explicate a developmentally-based, individually fashioned view of change. These views challenge traditional assumptions and declarations of allegiance to overriding theory. The book covers the dialogue between applied research and clinical work, the role of play and its relation to the growth of mind, mutuality and relatedness in the analytic relationship, and revising hetero-normative conceptions of gender and sexuality. Drawing on the recent innovations in the field, authors of various theoretical backgrounds describe and illustrate a synthetic nuanced account of child analytic work. Each highlights an aspect of child development and examines how psychoanalytic psychotherapy holds the potential to move development forward.

Integrating findings from neuroscience, infant research, gender theory, affect theory, and child development, this book looks at how developmental change is facilitated both within a psychoanalytic setting and outside it. Featuring a distinguished list of contributors, it will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as psychiatrists and social workers.

Christopher Bonovitz is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, & Clinical Assistant Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Contemporary Psychoanalysis and maintains a psychotherapy and consultation practice with children, adolescents, and adults in New York City.

Andrew Harlem, PhD is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, an instructor at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), and faculty member at Access Institute for Psychological Services. He is on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, is past president of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology and maintains a psychotherapy and consultation practice in San Francisco, California.