ABSTRACT

The second edition of this handbook continues the tradition established in the ®rst of offering an overview and explication of the profession of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. It is not, in any common sense, actually a handbook ± there is no intent to train the reader who will not, in turn, emerge as a child psychotherapist from the reading. Rather, we would hope to broaden knowledge about the profession and the range of work with children and young people that this adaptation of psychoanalysis encourages; we would wish in addition to explore what a psychoanalytic understanding ± in terms of theory, research and the implications for practice ± offers in work with distressed and `stuck' children and young people today.