Attachment, Play, and Authenticity

Donald Winnicott, the first pediatrician to become a child psychoanalyst, was the most influential and important child therapist in the field of child clinical psychiatry and psychology. Having consulted with over 30,000 mothers and children as part of his work in London city hospitals over 40 years, he had an almost magical capacity to engage with children and to soothe and guide parents through their most anxiety-ridden times. His optimistic notions of the “good enough” mother has calmed generations of parents; his depiction of security blankets (“transitional objects”) found full flower in the Charlie Brown character Linus; his stressing of the importance of the capacity to play as the gold standard of mental health had an enormous impact on preschool and kindergarten education and his focus on the insidious impact of a lack of authenticity or “false self” has led to countless papers on the malevolent impact of narcissism at both the individual and societal levels. Attachment, Play and Authenticity: Winnicott in a Clinical Context, 2nd edition, attempts to take these contributions and place them directly in the consulting room. Actual child-therapist vignettes are paired with each chapter's theoretical contributions. The reader is thus first transported to Winnicott's powerfully alive depictions of what happens in healthy and pathological mother-child interaction and then brought to see how these depictions manifest themselves in child therapy. No other work on Winnicott has applied this focus to the integration of theory and practice.

Table of Contents:
Preface Acknowledgments 1 Dialectical Meaning-Making in Infancy 2 A Good Object Must Be Found in Order to be Created 3 The True Self and False Compliance 4 We Are Essentially Isolates, with the Capacity to Be Alone 5 Using Objects and the Capacity to Hate 6 Integrating Theory with Therapy: The Case of Bob 7 The Meaning and Power of Play: How Does Learning to Play Enable Work and Indeed Life to Proceed? 8 The Mind, the Body, and the World of Transitional Phenomena 9 Hate in the Countertransference 10 The Antisocial Tendency 11 The Aims of Psychoanalytic Treatment 12 Winnicott as Therapist More than Theorist Bibliography Index About the Author

About the Author :
Steven Tuber is professor of Psychology, director of Clinical Training and program head of the doctoral program in clinical psychology at City College, CUNY, where he has taught for over 30 years. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology in clinical psychology, the editor of the book series, Psychodynamic Assessment and Psychotherapy for the 21st Century (Lexington Books) and on the editorial board of five different journals, including Psychoanalytic Psychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has authored and/or edited six critically acclaimed books and written over 150 papers in the intertwining fields of assessment and treatment of children and adolescents.

Review :
This second edition stands out front as a unique exceptionally thoughtful integrated summary of Winnicott's work. Tuber carefully identifies what is essential for students and clinicians to know and brings to it a coherence that piecemeal study would never achieve. This book is a wonderful presentation of Winnicott's work, from which both Winnicott and the author emerge with immense distinction. This is one of the few must-have books that no self-respecting psychotherapist should be without. There is something very special about Tuber’s capacity, not just to communicate Winncott’s ideas in a profound yet accessible way, but perfectly to embody his playful, creative brilliance. Each chapter moves seamlessly from exposition of a seminal Winnicott concept –the capacity to be alone, the necessity of hate, the use of an object, ruthlessness, true and false self -- through vivid contemporary up-dating, to detailed and truth-imbued clinical illustrations of work with children of varying ages, ethnicities and pathologies. As the man himself might have said: ‘hello glorious book, I’ve just devoured you’! Steve Tuber’s brilliant ode to Winnicott, now enriched with clinical material drawn from the work of beginning psychotherapists, brings the work of this master alive in all its richness and magic. I can think of no better interpreter of Winnicott for psychotherapists at all levels of training; this is a masterpiece.