Therapeutic Consultations in Child Psychiatry

Over a period of several decades, D.W. Winnicott evolved a personal way of relating to and communicating with children, offering them a live professional setting in which to discover themselves. He believed that, in the right case, a full and free use of the first interview can yield rich rewards, and he claimed that the right cases for this are common. He hoped that, by presenting these case studies, he would introduce the reader to the exciting potential of his approach, which depends as much on selection (of therapist) as on training. Here is his presentation - seventeen case histories whose significance for child psychiatry is in the tradition of Freud's case histories of the treatment of adult neurotics. Therapeutic Consultations in Child Psychiatry provides a fruitful feedback to psychoanalysis itself. This indeed was Winnicott's purpose: to help establish a creative dialogue between psychoanalysis and child psychiatry.