Psychotherapy with Infants and Young Children

This riveting book provides a comprehensive description of how attachment can be disrupted by stress and trauma--and how it can be mended through child-parent psychotherapy, an empirically supported treatment for infants, preschoolers, and their primary caretakers. Using the credo of 'starting with simplicity,' or developmental guidance, and moving on to behavioral and cognitive interventions and interpreting children's and parents' inner lives, this book is rich with diverse, illuminating clinical examples. Developmental psychologists, therapists, and anyone else working with traumatized infants and preschoolers should read this gem of a book. This is a wonderful text for training advanced graduate students in developmental psychology, infant psychology, and trauma psychology. --Judith A. Cohen, MD, Medical Director, Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents, Allegheny General Hospital, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Lieberman and Van Horn present an extremely sensitive and comprehensive understanding of how their relationship-based approach to therapy can lead both child and parent toward positive mental health. Readers learn how to implement this important therapeutic intervention, with whom to use it, and variations in its use across different systems, such as child welfare and the judicial system. All mental health practitioners working with young children will benefit from the vivid clinical examples that bring to life the process of change. This superb book demonstrates the importance of working in the relationship in early development, and illustrates beautifully how to intervene to change maladaptive patterns. --Joy D. Osofsky, PhD, Paul J. Ramsay Chair, Departments of Pediatrics and Psychiatry, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center This long-awaited book definitively describes child-parent psychotherapy, one of the most important and effective interventions in infant mental health. The authors are master clinicians who repeatedly place the reader in the trenches of clinical dilemmas and never disappoint with their thoughtful considerations of what transpires there. With clear and illuminating prose and richly evocative vignettes, this book is 'must' reading for child clinicians. --Charles H. Zeanah, Jr., MD, Mary Peters Sellars-Polchow Chair in Psychiatry and Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, Tulane University School of Medicine - Lieberman and Van Horn present a well-reasoned, well-integrated, admirably stated scholarly review of the various literatures on attachment research, child psychoanalysis, and developmental neurobiology....This is a well-narrated, sumptuous book which provides chicken soup for the clinicians' soul. It reconnects seasoned clinicians with their idealistic roots. It reinforces the fretful novice with its infectious aroma of optimism. Thus, it is a must read for clinicians, foster care workers, protective service workers, teachers, and all pediatric professionals who believe that the internal, unarticulated enactments emitted from the very young must have a meaning that through patient, thoughtful work can be understood, formulated into a captivating narrative and worked into a meaningful, transformative treatment plan. --The National Psychologist, 3/16/2011ff An essential book for those who work with traumatized young children and their families. --PsycCRITIQUES, 3/16/2011