ABSTRACT
This book has been concerned to describe certain aspects of childhood psychosis which have attracted the attention of one child psychotherapist and which do not seem to have been dealt with elsewhere in any detail. It has been difficult to write about such intense states of raw feeling. Wherever possible homely language has been used to offset their strangeness and to link them with elemental experiences embedded in the idioms of our language. Evocative language has also been used to enable the reader to enter the strange world of psychotic children. Total immersion and the ability to emerge from this immersion with a deeper understanding of oneself and the child is the only effective way of helping them. For some readers this must have seemed like a baptism by fire.
