ABSTRACT
Brent Willock offers a contrasting perspective to Bonovitz’s chapter, “A Child therapist at work: Playing, talking, and the therapist’s inner dialogue”. Emphasizing the premature disruption of Jason’s prenatal development (rather than his adoption), he explores the relevance of Ogden’s autistic-contiguous position for working with children (and adults) whose development has been interfered with by very early developmental trauma. Extending that neo-Kleinian construct, Willock underscores the foundational significance of prenatal life, highlighting challenges to the sensory beginnings of the bounded/grounded self/world experience presented by problematic perinatal experience. Psychotherapeutic investigation and remediation of primal deficits and distortions in the core structure of the self and its relational world are explored.
