This book explores some essential nonspecific factors of child psychotherapy. It is based on video transcripts and discussions of four outstanding child therapists during a two-day conference in Copenhagen in June 2013, pinpointing the moments of meeting and moments of change irrespective of method.Research has shown that nonspecific factors such as relationship and personality have a stronger correlation to outcome than method. The basic argument of The Science and Magic of Child Psychotherapy is that skilled psychotherapists do similar things while describing them differently, and that psychological healing is created in the context of relationship. Presenting therapists here include Peter Levine from the USA (working with with Somatic Experiencing on trauma states); Jukka Makela from Finland (with Theraplay, working with disorganized attachment); Haldor Ovreeide from Norway (with a therapeutic conversation in a disrupted son-mother dyad); and Eia Asen from the London Marlborough Clinic (with systemic and mentalization-based family therapy working on a dependent attachment pattern).
The closing chapters of the book summarize the high points of the discussions among the four therapists about nonspecific but shared aspects of their interventions, moderated by Susan Hart and Marianne Bentzen.
Industry Reviews
'This book is a very valuable practical application of my decades of developmental research on the psychobiological transformations of meaning from somatic processes in infancy to cortical processes in adolescence. Building on my work with my colleagues in the Boston Process Change Group, Marianne Bentzen and Susan Hart focus on the micro-regulatory processes between parents and children and therapist and patients that generate transformation processes in psychotherapy. As we proposed in the Boston group, the authors see the therapeutic relationship itself as the single most powerful process in psychotherapy. This book begins to reveal that any therapist in every moment simultaneously operates at as multiple psychobiological meaning making levels that can map onto the polymorphic meaning making of the child, such that new meanings and transformations are co-created. The neuroaffective compass model presented provides the clinician working with children and their families with directionality at these multiple levels. '-Ed Tronick, University Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts Boston; Research Associate, Harvard Medical School; and author of The Neurobehavioral and Social Emotional Development of the Infant and Young Child'This intriguing and original book is the first exploration of the "moments of meeting" paradigm, which Dan Stern would have been delighted with and all of us can learn from. The authors have provided a highly integrated application of neuroaffective developmental psychology to bring a revitalising perspective to psychological therapy for children. It is well worth reading - and reading again.'-Professor Peter Fonagy, PhD, FBA, OBE, Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis and Head of the Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London; Chief Executive, The Anna Freud Centre, London
