"Imagination for Two" Child Psychotherapy during Coronavirus Outbreak: Building a Space for Play When Space Collapses. (1st October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Shulman, Yonit; Saroff, Abraham
• Is Part Of: Journal of infant, child, and adolescent psychotherapy. Volume 19:Number 4(2020)
• Page Start: 339
• Page End: 345
• Publication Date: 2020-10-01
• Subjects: Child psychotherapy -- Periodicals; Adolescent psychotherapy -- Periodicals; Infant psychiatry -- Periodicals; 616.891405
• DOI: 10.1080/15289168.2020.1831355
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1528-9168

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Alvarez and Reid in the introduction to their book "Autism and Personality" suggest that in the absence of play the therapist's own resources are frequently the only means available to bring into being liveliness, creativity, and play in the child patient's inner world. Reid writes: "The therapist must have a mind for two, energy for two, hope for two, imagination for two". In the following paper, we discuss the therapeutic work required of the child psychotherapist, in times in which the space of life itself collapses under incessant attack of annihilation anxiety, uncertainty, and a sudden breakdown of all that gives us an experience (or maybe an illusion?) of meaning and continuity. Times in which the possibility to "work and love" collapses as the places where we do "love and work" are closed to us or become partial and lacking.