While the psychodynamic understanding of play and play's therapeutic potential was long restricted to the realm of children, Winnicott's work demonstrated the profound significance of the capacity to play for healthy mental functioning during adult life. Scattered writings of Erikson, Glenn, and Shopper notwithstanding, the early spark of understanding remained largely ill developed. In Play and Playfulness, the reader is offered an exciting and highly informative set of essays about the psychic area that lies between reality and unreality and between veracity and imagination. It is the area of paradox and creativity. It sustains the self, allows for ego-replenishing regressions, and adds to the joy of the vital and lived experience. This book provides an easy and readable passage to the valley of the transitional experience in which creative synthesis of reality and unreality leads to a world of vigor, enthusiasm, and liveliness. The cultural variations and the clinical implications of such an experience are thoroughly elucidated. The result is a volume replete with technical virtuosity, clinical relevance, and the basic and nearly self evident humane music of the day-to-day experience of life.

The Mother and Her Child: Clinical Aspects of Attachment, Separation, and Loss, edited by Salman Akhtar, focuses upon the formation of an individual's self in the crucible of the early mother-child relationship. Bringing together contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts and child observational researchers, it elucidates the nuances of mothering, the child's tie to the mother, the mysteries of secure attachment, and the hazards of insecure attachment. These experts also discuss issues of separation, loss, and alternate sources of love when the mother is absent or emotionally unavailable, while highlighting the relevance of such ideas to the treatment of children and adults.

This book is about affect--its origins, development, and uses--and how it is viewed in a clinical setting. The authors track and further develop the recent major changes in the understanding of affect. From its roots in childhood development to its cross-cultural aspects, affect remains clinically relevant in issues such as aggression and forgiveness.

Mourning and the importance of the capacity to bear some helplessness, while still finding pleasure in life, are central to this tightly organized volume. The multi-faceted processes involved in mourning and adaptation are addressed.

Clinical Perspectives on Reflective Parenting: Keeping the Child's Mind in Mind describes the Center for Reflective Parenting and techniques developed at the Center for helping parents to be able to understand and reflect on their children's emotional states, as a way of helping them to be more effective parents. Discussion of neurobiological correlates of "reflective parenting," and of similar techniques used at the Pacella Child Center and in other settings, places the clinical technique in the context of other work directed at helping parents help their children to grow up emotionally healthy.

Psychoanalytic Trends in Theory and Practice serves as a guide for the novice, and a refresher for the expert, into the history and current status of major psychoanalytic concepts. Each chapter author, reviews the development of a concept over the history of psychoanalysis, includes clinical examples to illustrate the concept, and identifies current questions about the topic. Further, many chapters embody a developmental perspective, not just in terms of an idea or concept, but also in terms of the individual; these sections explore how the experiences of the child inform that of the adult. M. Hossein Etezady, Inga Blom, and Mary Davis honor core concepts that continue to inform contemporary psychoanalytic practice, demonstrate the ongoing relevance and utility of the psychoanalytic perspective, and provide a solid and integrative foundation for further exploration into the next generation of theory and clinical work.