Reading Anna Freud
A guided introduction to Anna Freud's writings and child-analytic legacy.
Reading Anna Freud is less a work of criticism than a work of orientation, and doubly valuable as such.
Midgley works through Anna Freud's principal papers chapter by chapter, summarising the main argument of each, setting its historical circumstances, and weighing its present clinical relevance. Writing as a practising child psychotherapist, he presents Anna Freud less as a historical monument than as a working clinician whose diagnostic and technical questions remain live ones.
The material covered runs from the ego and the mechanisms of defence to the difference between child analysis and developmental therapy, the diagnostic profile and the concept of developmental lines, and the application of analytic thinking in nurseries, paediatric wards, classrooms and the courts. Midgley sets out her disagreements with Klein over child technique without taking sides, and shows how her wartime observation of children fed her later theory of development.
For the clinician the book supplies a usable framework for developmental assessment: a way of reading a defence in relation to a child's age and situation, and an argument for fitting technique to developmental need rather than transferring an adult model wholesale.
About the author
Nick Midgley
Nick Midgley is a British child and adolescent psychotherapist and Professor of Psychological Therapies with Children and Young People at UCL, where he is Academic Director for the Doctorate in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy. He is a psychotherapist at the Anna Freud Centre and co-directs the Child Attachment and Psychological Therapies Research Unit (ChAPTRe). His research covers child psychotherapy outcomes and mentalization-based treatment for children (MBT-C). He wrote Reading Anna Freud and co-wrote a book on time-limited MBT-C.
Details
- 2012
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 256
- 9780415601009