Rustin Margaret

This book brings together some of Margaret Rustin’s finest papers in the areas of infant observation, theory, research and literature. Drawing on more than 50 years of psychoanalytic practice, the author offers a richly layered exploration of the central place of close observation and imagination in illuminating the inner worlds of children and young people. Illustrated with vivid clinical examples, the collection engages with a broad range of themes including the place of interpretation in child psychotherapy, the experience of shame in childhood, dreams and play in child analysis and the challenges of clinical research. A final section turns to literature and drama, tracing the vital connections between imagination and psychic life. Essential reading for child psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and child analysts, as well as all those training as mental health professionals, this book will also appeal to anyone with an interest in the emotional dimensions of human experience.

This book brings together some of Margaret Rustin’s finest papers in the areas of infant observation, theory, research and literature. Drawing on more than 50 years of psychoanalytic practice, the author offers a richly layered exploration of the central place of close observation and imagination in illuminating the inner worlds of children and young people. Illustrated with vivid clinical examples, the collection engages with a broad range of themes including the place of interpretation in child psychotherapy, the experience of shame in childhood, dreams and play in child analysis and the challenges of clinical research. A final section turns to literature and drama, tracing the vital connections between imagination and psychic life. Essential reading for child psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and child analysts, as well as all those training as mental health professionals, this book will also appeal to anyone with an interest in the emotional dimensions of human experience.

Short-term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (STPP) is a manualised, time-limited model of psychoanalytic psychotherapy comprising twenty-eight weekly sessions for the adolescent patient and seven sessions for parents or carers, designed so that it can be delivered within a public mental health system, such as Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the UK. It has its origins in psychoanalytic theoretical principles, clinical experience, and empirical research suggesting that psychoanalytic treatment of this duration can be effective for a range of disorders, including depression, in children and young people. The manual explicitly focuses on the treatment of moderate to severe depression, both by detailing the psychoanalytic understanding of depression in young people and through careful consideration of clinical work with this group. It is the first treatment manual to describe psychoanalytic psychotherapy for adolescents with depression. The treatment approach described in this manual has been used in a multi-site randomised controlled trial in the UK, 'Improving Mood with Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Therapies' (IMPACT) and internationally. It is presented here as a treatment to be used in routine clinical practice and will be of interest to child psychotherapists, multi-disciplinary professionals in young people’s mental health, service providers, and researchers alike. After describing theoretical models of depression and presenting an overview of STPP as a treatment model, the manual details the specific stages of the STPP process for the therapist and adolescent patient. It then describes the nature and scope of parallel work with parents and gives a detailed account of the function of supervision.

Observing young children at play is an everyday and often fascinating and pleasurable experience for many of us. It also has a great pedigree in the development of psychoanalysis from Freud's observation of his grandson's game with the cotton-reel onwards. This book describes the practice of observing young children in home and nursery settings in a systematic and non-intrusive way in order to expand our understanding of their emotional, cognitive, and social development. It uses a psychoanalytic lens to enrich the meaning of what is seen. How do minds and personalities take shape? How can we train people to see what is most relevant in helping children to develop? The chapters range from classic papers by famous practitioners of an older generation to observations completed in recent years in the UK, Europe, and the US. Observation of this sort has also spread to Latin America, India, Australia, Africa, and the Far East. The differences and continuities with Infant Observation are the starting point.

This book provides the history, theory, and practice of work discussion as developed at the Tavistock Clinic. It describes the evolution and contemporary practice of work discussion in relation to a wide range of professional work with children, adolescents, and families.

This book brings the insights of psychoanalysis to bear on drama in the western dramatic tradition. Plays which are discussed in detail include works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Wilde, and Beckett among others. The authors seek to show that the subtle understanding of conscious and unconscious emotions achieved by psychoanalytic practice can bring new ways of understanding classic works of drama. The argument of the book, set out in its introduction and exemplified in its discussion of individual dramatists and plays, is that western drama has represented the central tensions of societies as crises in the relationships of gender and generation, through dramatic explorations of the inner life of families. This is the common theme which links the book's analysis of Medea, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream amongst others. The value of this book lies in the originality of its analysis of individual plays, and the subtlety with which it brings psychoanalytic and sociological insights together.

On its first publication Narratives of Love and Loss was widely recognised as an important and perceptive contribution to the study of children's literature and for its capacity to stimulate deep emotional responses in both child and adult readers. This welcome reissue includes a new postscript exploring in detail the phenomenal success of J. K Rowling's series of Harry Potter stories. The authors succeed in bringing a deep sociological and psychoanalytic close reading to some of the finest writing for children in post-war Britain and America, including works by C. S. Lewis, Rumer Godden, E. B. White and Russel Hoban. Focussed primarily on the 'fantasy genre of stories' the authors identify and sensitively explore the themes of imaginative and emotional growth, language and play, love and loss; always situating these within the broader social and cultural context.