Child Therapy in the Great Outdoors: A Relational View

by Sebastiano Santostefano

Overview

Building on relational conceptualizations of enactment and on developmental research that attests to the role of embodied, nonverbal language in the meanings children impute to their experiences, Sebastiano Santostefano offers this compelling demonstration of effective child therapy conducted in the “great outdoors.” Specifically, he argues that, for the child, traumatic life-metaphors should be resolved at an embodied rather than an exclusively verbal level; they should be resolved, that is, as they are enacted between child and therapist. To this end, child and therapist must take advantage of all the indoor and outdoor environments available to them. As they take therapy to nontraditional places, relying on the nonverbal vocabulary they have constructed together, they move toward enacted solutions to relational crises, solutions that revise the child’s sense of self and ability to form new and productive relationships.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138157996
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/14/2016
Series:	Relational Perspectives Book Series
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Interacting and Enacting with a Therapist and Environments: The Path to the Pathway of Change. Ernest: I Detached My Embodied Self from Relationships Because of the Pain and Emotional Deprivation I Experienced. Vera: Abandoned at the Doorstep of an Orphanage, I Battled the Abuse I Embodied to Gain My Freedom. Ernest and Vera from the Vantage Point of Environmental Psychology and Ecopsychology. A Psychoanalytic-Relational-Developmental Model for Conducting Child Psychotherapy. Environments, Interactions, and Embodied Meanings: Probing How Three Are One.

Editorial Reviews

"Sebastiano Santostefano's charming book on the proper way to conduct child psychotherapy covers many pertinent issues that often arise in work with young children, and offers many rich theoretical ideas and promising therapeutic techniques. Santostefano delves into two clinical narratives of young children who progressed remarkably under his care. The narratives not only demonstrate the author's inventive technique, they also testify to his gift as a psychotherapist to children, his empathic understanding of their needs, thoughts, and perspectives."
—Psychologist-Psychoanalyst

From the Publisher