For all those engaged in psychotherapy practice, regardless of modality or approach, the goal of this book is to provide a framework and method for thinking about their work that allows for critical reflection on their own successes and disappointments, and on the similarities and differences among their own and other practitioners’ work with different clients. The authors use a novel "common factors" approach, based on the idea that some form of development is the outcome of all effective psychotherapy, despite other differences that may exist. While most existing psychotherapy research focuses on treatment outcomes, primarily in terms of symptom reduction, this book offers an alternative research approach that systematically tracks the psychotherapy process itself, and describes each case’s unique developmental outcome. In particular, Basseches & Mascolo focus on the questions of what kinds of therapeutic resources therapists are offering to their clients and whether and how clients are able to make use of these resources in the service of their own development. The goal is to provide a descriptive framework that can be used to appreciate the highly varied ways in which particular therapists tailor their work to unique clients’ developmental needs, while at the same time offering a prescription of a more rigorous method for recognizing and correcting the problem when a particular therapist’s way of working is not serving the client well. Ideally, this type of process-focused research will complement existing outcome research, and be more likely than further symptom-reduction studies to result in the improvement of overall psychotherapy success rates.

""This treasurehouse of a book glows with contributions to every fundamental aspect of psychoanalysis. Dr. Pine moves with grace and authority between the worlds of child development and clinical process, between abstract theory and the concrete methods and data of child observation, and between classical psychoanalysis and the varieties of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy. His well-chosen clinical examples are models of sensitivity, clarity, and ingenuity. Altogether, a remarkable achievement and a 'must' book for every psychoanalytic reader.""-Roy Schafer

and knowledge, and as a possible way to illuminate change processes in psychotherapy. Today, developmental researchers and neuroscientists increasingly locate keys to psychological health and development in the earliest interactions between mother and infant." "This book, which consists of significant papers by the BCPSG, traces the group's contributions to psychoanalytic topics of note, including; the location of the implicit, the creation of meaning, the moment-by-moment clinical process, and the subjective experience of the therapist. The book also includes new introductions to selected chapters, which provide background on the original intent and reception of each article." --Book Jacket.

This groundbreaking work advances a developmental perspective on both the basic processes of therapeutic change and the classification of childhood problems, offering a novel approach to the search for effective treatments for children. Generating a new flow of ideas between clinical practice and empirical research, the volume revitalizes basic modalities such as psychodynamic, play and cognitive therapies by identifying the core ingredients that enhance and retard the processes of change. The authors also demonstrate the limitations of utilizing diagnostic labels as the basis for assessing treatment efficacy, arguing instead for an integrative approach that links methods of intervention with a case-relevant analysis of the child's emotional, interpersonal and cognitive development. This book will appeal to clinical and school psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and other clinicians working with children, as well as researchers in the field. It also serves as a text in graduate-level courses on child treatment and child psychopathology.

Print+CourseSmart

Like hiking off the well-traveled trail, attempting to bridge foreign do mains of research and practice entails certain risks. This volume repre sents an effort to explore the relatively uncharted territory of cognitive and social-cognitive processes embedded in child psychotherapy. The territory is largely uncharted, not because of a lack of interest in children and cognition, but because child psychotherapy has been chronically neglected by clinical researchers. For example, recent meta-analyses of the effectiveness of child psychotherapy draw on less than 30 non behavioral studies of child psychotherapy conducted over a 30-year period. The average of one study per year pales in comparison to the volume of research on adult psychotherapy. Moreover, research exam ining cognitive, affective, and language processes in child psycho therapy is virtually nonexistent. Consequently, the contributions to this volume should not be seen as reviews of an extant, clinical-research literature. Instead, they represent attempts to expand the more familiar and well-researched province of developmental psychology into the rel atively uncharted domain of child psychotherapy process. In addition to bridging the literature on child psychotherapy with research perspectives on children's cognitive and social-cognitive devel opment, this volume attempts to cross a second gap. Recent surveys of the utilization of psychotherapy research by practicing psychotherapists indicate the distance between these two domains is substantial. Only a small minority of practitioners find psychotherapy research to be a useful source of information for their practice.