Techniques of Child Therapy: Psychodynamic Strategies Hardcover - 1989

From the publisher

In reading this book one enters the emotional life of the child. Acting on his belief that the best way to learn therapeutic techniques is to experience the actual process of therapy, Morton Chethik makes the child patient come alive by using extensive vignettes or full case descriptions. The reader thus experiences the case as treatment unfolds with all of its attendant problems, difficulties, and strategies. Chethik then extracts and discusses basic concepts embedded in the clinical material. Effectively integrating the theoretical with the practical, TECHNIQUES OF CHILD THERAPY both addresses major issues in contemporary child psychotherapy and highlights the struggles practitioners frequently experience during the course of long-term treatment. On the theoretical level, it redefines and adapts basic concepts of adult dynamic psychotherapy--such as therapeutic alliance, resistance, transference, insight, countertransference, interventionto the unique requirements of therapy with children. The work also demonstrates that an essential modification in work with children is the use of play as a the basic form of communication between patient and therapist. Because a primary purpose of all psychotherapy is to work with the patient's affective life, play is a central medium since it is commonly children's major mode of expressing their emotional lives. The book focuses on how to facilitate play in treatment as well as how to use and understand therapeutic play as it occurs in the course of treatment. Also highlighted are the differential techniques necessary for dealing with the distinct--and distinctive--manifestations of major psychopathologies in children. This core section of the book describes in detail the treatment of several neurotic children through intensive uncovering'' psychotherapy. It then contrasts this approach with other forms of treatment specifically geared to borderline, narcissistic and character-disordered children. Finally, since no treatment of the child can be effective without working with the parents, TECHNIQUES OF CHILD THERAPY also discusses and illustrates established parent-intervention strategies. These interventions range from supportive parent guidance to in-depth treatment of the parent-child relationship. TECHNIQUES IN CHILD THERAPY reflects the typical issues and problems with which all practitioners and trainees in child psychotherapy must grapple. Its extensive clinical material yields unique insights into the emotional and cognitive world of the child as well as effective treatment strategies that will be invaluable to psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers who work with children.