Primer on Integrating Psychotherapies for Children and Adolescents

Since 1992, Dr. Sebastiano Santostefano has been Director of The Institute for Child and Adolescent Development, Inc., a nonprofit organization established to provide programs in the community that serve children and their families who have witnessed tragedies and endured major life stressors. The Institute also provides training to mental health professionals and conducts research on the effects of life stressors on body image and cognitive and emotional development.Besides practicing clinical psychology and psychoanalysis, Dr. Santostefano has been an active investigator in the area of cognition in personality development and adaptation. He is the author of many articles and four books that focus on research, assessment, and treatment of developmental psychopathology relying on the integration of psychoanalytic, developmental, cognitive, and behavioral concepts.

In this seminal work, Sebastiano Santostefano has taken on a daunting task—the integration of psychodynamic, cognitive, and behavioral approaches to the psychotherapeutic treatment of children. Stimulated by his own research and practice over the past thirty years into the vicissitudes of emotion, imagination, thought, and action, the author has created a new developmental-dialectical theory that dissolves the traditional boundaries between mind and body, affect and cognition, and reality and fantasy. Every clinician practicing today would be wise to read this book before making another intervention.