Contemporary Child Psychotherapy: Integration and Imagination in Creative Clinical Practice [Paperback]

Contemporary Child Psychotherapy: Integration and Imagination in Creative Clinical Practice demonstrates the step-by-step process of developing the depth of understanding, creativity, knowledge and skill that underpin a modern integrative child psychotherapist. Portrayed is a flexible model that is fluid and evolving, bringing together traditional, long-held ideas with fresh perspectives and up-to-date research. In bringing together psychoanalytic theory, attachment theory, trauma theories, the arts and creativity, neuroscience and the body, a rich framework is created. From this, the individual integrative child psychotherapist can choose the interventions which best foster the emotional development of each unique child and their parents today. The spirit of this book resides in its abiding pursuit of greater integration - integration of all sorts, whether it be the bringing together of the many facets of ourselves or of the systems which surround us; or whether it be the numerous ways of understanding and improving the often tragic lives of some of the children it serves. One of the remarkable qualities of this book is its readiness to embrace a whole array of different theories and therapeutic approaches to enable children, and the adults around them, to make sense of the various pieces of their troubled childhoods and thus generate hope for the future. For twenty years, the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education (IATE) has built a four-year training programme in integrative child psychotherapy that forcefully draws on the imagination of the arts, the insights of psychoanalysis, the discoveries of neuroscience, and the body realities of biology and physiology. The training is without doubt a thorough and strenuous experience and calls forth not only the academic abilities of trainees but, more importantly, their capacities to observe and reflect on their own emotional experiences. Peter Wilson, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and founder andlC.