1st Edition
The Presence of the Therapist Treating Childhood Trauma
The Presence of the Therapist uses clinical studies based on the author's publications over the past 18 years to illustrate work with severely distressed children. The reader is encouraged to enter a dialogue with the author to explore the many dilemmas and difficulties of working with a person who has become highly defensive or fearful as a result of what has happened to them.
This book is a highly stimulating account of psychotherapeutic practice. It facilitates careful and broad thought about the therapeutic process and relationship that will improve clinical practice. The practical advice on how to survive in this demanding work will be of great benefit to all psychotherapists.
Biography
Monica Lanyado is a psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapist. She is co-editor, with Ann Horne, of The Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy: Psychoanalytic Approaches.
'Lanyado charts her many years of treating very disturbed children, often with appalling histories of abuse, neglect and abandonment, in a variety of settings. She is especially concerned with exploring the personal nature of what the therapist takes into the the consulting room and how this links with the process of therapeutic change... Lanyado uses many clinical examples to weave her thoughts around the central theme of the presence of the therapist in the process of psychic change wrought in the clinical encounter... Lanyado's account of her work and her thoughtful, imaginative way of making sense of it... shows her readers how this deep and courageous preparedness to know one's own responses is ultimately in the service of reaching the patient.' - Angela Joyce, International Journal of Psychoanalysis
