On Children Who Privilege the Body

Ann Horne was head of the Independent child psychotherapy training and post-graduate development at the BAP (now IPCAPA). She is co-editor of The Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy and of the four earlier books in this series. Now retired, she gives talks and writes, retaining a special interest in children who act with the body rather than reflect.

• Transforming Despair to Hope: Reflections on the psychotherapeutic process with severely neglected and traumatised children Monica LanyadoContentsAcknowledgements and permissions Foreword – Peter Wilson IntroductionChapter 1 ‘The far reaching consequences of neglect and trauma in childhood.’Chapter 2 ‘The historical and social context: influences on the treatment of severely neglected and traumatised children today’.Chapter 3. ‘The absence of ‘holding’ and containment, and the absence of parental protection’.Chapter 4. ‘Complex traumatic childhood losses: mourning and acceptance, endings and beginnings.’Chapter 5. ‘Playing out not acting out. The development of the capacity to play in the therapy of children who are ‘in transition’ from fostering to adoption.’ (2008)Chapter 6. ‘The playful presence of the therapist: ‘antidoting’ defences in the therapy of a late adopted adolescent patient’ (2006)Chapter 7. ‘Transition and change: An exploration of the resonances between transitional and meditative states of mind and their role in the therapeutic process.’ (2012)Chapter 8. ‘The impact of listening on the listener. Consultation to the helping professions who work with sexually abused young people’. (2009)Chapter 9. ‘Transforming despair to hope in the treatment of extreme trauma: a view from the supervisor’s chair’ (2016)Appendix - PublicationsIndexReferences

This is an outstanding book and would be as useful to professionals working with adults as with children. The connection between body and mind is increasingly popular, but this book is unique in the detailed descriptions of how this develops, and how pathological versions can be understood and helped.It is about work with very difficult, often violent, patients. Ann Horne is generous in her attitude both to the patients and to the professionals attempting to work with them. Her honesty about her own capacities is not false modesty but will enable colleagues to discover what their own potential is in this valuable work. She writes of freeing herself from institutional positions, in the context of very careful, self-reflexive work. A very useful example to us readers. Dilys Daws - Honorary Consultant Child Psychotherapist, Tavistock Clinic, London; author of Through the Night and (with Alexandra de Rementeria) Finding Your Way With Your Baby.A truly Independent and inspiring voice emerges out of the pages of this deeply insightful and moving book. Ann Horne’s clinical wisdom and exquisite attunement to her young patients’ experience, and use, of their bodies will enrich all readers, however experienced or new to the profession. An essential and very rewarding read.Alessandra Lemma, Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Consultant, Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. Visiting Professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL and Visiting Professor, Istituto Winnicott, RomeIn this collection of papers by Ann Horne, an outstanding practitioner, teacher, author and editor in the field of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, her finely articulated emotional intelligence, humour and wisdom - born of decades of experience with severely challenging young people - comes to the fore. This book offers a legacy of psychoanalytic thought for the attention of current and future colleagues, as well as for policy makers in the field of child mental health. Helen Taylor Robinson - Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis; Adult, Child and Adolescent Analyst and Joint General Editor of the Collected Works of D.W. Winnicott