Short description:

In Analysing Adolescents and Children: Learning to Surf, Mary Brady expertly guides the reader through the challenging and vital process of working with young analysands.

Long description:

In Psychoanalysis with Adolescents and Children: Learning to Surf, Mary T. Brady expertly guides the reader through the challenging and vital process of working with young analysands.

Brady likens the experience to ?learning to surf.? While finding Bion?s metaphor that the analyst must be able to ?think under fire? useful, she suggests ?learning to surf? is more apt in psychoanalysis with adolescents and children. Drawing on this metaphor throughout the volume, she describes how the adolescent can be potentially upended, injured or even killed by emotional waves too tumultuous to manage. Surfing also evokes the often uneasy but sometimes thrilling balances of adolescence. Using clinical vignettes from her extensive experience in the field, Brady explores how to work with young people experiencing issues such as eating disorders, gender challenges, parental substance abuse and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on Bionian Field Theory, as well as the work of Donald Winnicott, she explores how analysts can surf with the adolescent or child in navigating the ebb and flow of psychic life and development.

This book is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, including psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and counselors, who treat children and adolescents.

?Well, Mary Brady has done it yet again. This is a beautiful book, full of tumult, turbulence, bravery and grace. The clinical work is outstanding, and the image of surfing is the most apt we clinicians have ever been provided with for adolescent treatment.  I used to think of tightropes, but surfing takes you forward somewhere - maybe even somewhere thrilling.?

Anne Alvarez, PhD, MACP, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist 

?In publishing this book, Mary Brady invites us to embark on a journey, and she does so with a skill that can only be acquired through years of clinical practice, deep reflection, and experience in writing and publishing in psychoanalysis.  This excellent book invites us to surf its pages, glide through them, and share the exciting experience of analyzing adolescents - the true protagonists of all the significant historical changes ahead.?

Virginia Ungar, MD, Past President of the International Psychoanalytic Association (2017 ? 2021)

?Based on her clinical expertise with children and adolescents, Mary Brady?s book captures the essence and the complexity of psychoanalytic technique with young patients who are in pain and in severely damaged environments. The book includes beautiful chapters, some in collaboration with other eminent psychoanalysts. The diversity of clinical work presented here and the rigor of theory, for instance in the usage of Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott makes this book stand out. I have no doubt that it will be of great interest to those working in the field of mental health.? 

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, MD, PhD, Chair of the IPA Committee on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis

Table of Contents:

Series Foreword Foreword Permissions Introduction: Psychoanalysis with Adolescents and Children: Learning to Surf  1. Learning to surf: Analyzing adolescents  2. ?Daddy?s Head is Broken?: The Treatment of Children of Severe Alcoholics  3. The Oblivious Object  4. Adolescent Feminine Subjectivities Elaborated via Transitory Objects in the Analytic Field  5. Fear of Eating Up the Mother: An Adolescent Phantasy in Some Anorectics  6. To Know or Not to Know: An Application of Bion?s K and ?K to Child Treatment  7. Considerations Regarding the Establishment of Play Space: Shifting Psychic States in a 5-Year-Old  8. Totalitarian Regimes and a Child?s Mind: Cria Cuervos  9.  Adolescent Psychic Isolation and Bodily-Based Symptoms in the COVID-19 Pandemic