How do we talk about feelings to children who are cut off from feeling? How do we raise hope and a sense of safety in despairing and terrified children without offering false hope? The Thinking Heart is a natural sequel to Live Company, Anne Alvarez' highly influential and now classic book about working with severely disturbed and damaged children.
Key Features
- Three Levels of Analytic Work:
- Explanatory Level – the "why - because"
- Descriptive Level – the "whatness" of what the child feels
- Intensified Vitalizing Level – gaining access to feeling itself for children with chronic dissociation, despairing apathy or 'undrawn' autism.
- Structured Schema: Offers guidance for therapists to find the right level of interpretation in their work with clients.
- Target Audience: Useful for Psychotherapists, Psychoanalysts, Clinical and Educational Psychologists, Child Psychiatrists, Social Workers, Special needs teachers, and carers of disturbed children.
Additional Information
Building on 50 years of experience as a child and adolescent psychotherapist, Alvarez uses detailed and vivid clinical examples of different interactions between therapist and client, and explores the reasons why one type of therapeutic understanding can work rather than another. She also addresses what happens when the therapist gets it wrong.
Specifications
Anne Alvarez is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and is retired Co-Chair for The Autism Service at the Tavistock Clinic, London. She is currently a visiting teacher and lecturer for the Tavistock Clinic, and a Lecturer on the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society Child Programme.
