ABSTRACT
New Discoveries in Child Psychotherapy presents eleven new contributions to child psychoanalytic research, most of them based on the experience of the clinical consulting room. Each chapter is the work of an experienced child psychotherapist or child analyst, vivid in their description of the children and families they encountered. Their understanding of the "inner worlds" of patients and the clinical consulting room is clearly evidenced in their analysis of clinical presentations.
The chapters are the result of the psychoanalytic clinical and observational practices of their authors, allied to their use of rigorous qualitative research methods, in particular Grounded Theory and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). They describe developments of child psychoanalytic knowledge in several fields, including autism, psychotherapy with severely deprived children, and the study of early infancy. They demonstrate advances in child psychoanalytic theories and methods and the development of new forms of clinical service provision. Contested issues in psychoanalytic research are thoroughly evaluated, showing how it can be made more accountable and rigorous through the adaptation of established qualitative research methods to the study of unconscious mental phenomena.
New Discoveries in Child Psychotherapy will be an essential text in the field of child psychoanalysis and will be highly useful in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis training courses and for psychoanalytic researchers, as well as for practitioners.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|143 pages
Mainly theory and clinical method
chapter Chapter One|32 pages
A single case of psychoanalytic infant observation and what it reveals about loss and recovery in infancy
chapter Chapter Three|37 pages
The desert, the jungle, and the garden: some aspects of autistic functioning and language development
chapter Chapter Four|31 pages
Curiouser and curiouser: researching the K link in psychoanalytic therapy
chapter Chapter Five|20 pages
A comparison of process notes and audio recordings in psychoanalytic psychotherapy
part II|137 pages
Mainly practice: contributions to service development