Psychoanalysis and Developmental Therapy

The authors of this book were all trained, wholly or in part, at the Anna Freud Centre, Hampstead, London. Their understanding of their patients’ problems is guided by a fundamentally psychoanalytic orientation in which the role of internal conflicts, anxiety, guilt, love and hate, primitive as well as more sophisticated object relations, and a complex variety of defenses take central place. Recent advances in understanding the nature of infant attachment, attunement between mother and baby, and the central role of the development of mentalization and the reflective function, all influence the authors’ approach to their subject.