The psychic significance of the figure of the grandmother in psychodynamic psychotherapy has received scant attention. This paper develops the concept of the "grandmaternal transference" in parent-infant psychotherapy and explores its identification, its possible functions and its therapeutic significance. The grandmaternal transference has…

The article begins with a brief exploration of the various aspects of adolescent's psychic qualities as these are described in Greek mythology. It is argued that myths are an integral part of the way that adolescence is perceived and myths play an important role in adolescents' psychic and external world, as well as in their mythological thinking.…

Leading the charge to link intervention research with clinical practice is the development of process research, which involves a detailed analysis of specific therapeutic processes over the course of treatment. The delineation of interaction structures--repetitive patterns of interactions between patient and therapist over the course of…

This paper charts the journey made towards verbal communication with Mackenzie, a boy who was three years old at the start of treatment and diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder. In this paper, I bring together diverse areas of research and demonstrate how they inform my clinical practice. Together, these ideas created a multimodal and…

This paper argues that siblinghood has had an important place in child psychotherapy thinking for many decades. Both psychoanalytic observation of young children and clinical experience have contributed to this. It discusses some reasons for the renewed interest in siblings in the wider psychoanalytic field and emphasises the existential threat to…

Psychoanalysis and child psychotherapy have traditionally sought to describe their relationship to science in a variety of ways. As a consequence, different strands of the research programme are underpinned by divergent methodological and epistemic assumptions. The perceived incommensurability of these positions sometimes hinders the development…

This paper suggests that some neuroscience concepts particularly concerned with brain pathways in trauma and fear, as well as the neurobiology of emotion, provide an additional vertex to the psychoanalytic understanding of patients' material. The role of the body has been neglected in psychoanalytic thought and formulations in favour of purely…