Abstract
The dual tension between first, the various ‘brands’ of competing psychotherapies and second, between psychotherapy and cost-driven mental health policies with demands of ‘quality assurance’ for contractors and accountability to insurance companies, in many cases taking precedence over adequate patient care, means that any current psychotherapy text book must address these issues. Professor Helmut Remschmidt's translated 1997 edition achieves this and more. Most chapters have either very useful figures or case studies.
Eleven German and two British contributors provide 34 chapters which cover in four sections basic principles of psychotherapy; outlines of the methods of psychodynamic, behavioural, cognitive behavioural, interpersonal play, as well as group and family therapy and psychodrama; application of psychotherapy techniques to a wide spectrum of conditions including a range of emotional disorders to psychosis, substance abuse to stuttering; and finally, addresses the demands on psychotherapy of various settings such as inpatient, day-patient and home treatment.
Despite achieving ambitious aims, to provide such a broad coverage of the field of psychotherapy with children, adolescence and their families, based on the European ICD-10 classification for specific disorders and their treatment, a number of issues troubled me as I read the book. First, the English translation appears over four years after the original German text. In the rapidly advancing area of developmental psychology and psychopathology finding most references dated before 1997 is a serious drawback.
Second, given that attachment theory, research and clinical applications in child, adolescent and infant mental health underpins emerging areas of psychotherapy thinking [1], the absence of any serious discussion devoted to attachment or even mention of the term ‘attachment’ in the index is troubling. This omission may, in part, reflect different cultural attitudes to the importance of attachment research held by European, North American and UK academics and clinicians. Third, while there are readable chapters dealing with physical abuse and neglect, and sexual abuse and maltreatment, the lack of discussion on ‘trauma’ or posttraumatic stress disorder in childhood is of further concern in a modern psychotherapy text.
While I have been impressed with the other publications in the Cambridge Child and Adolescent Psychiatry series dealing with specific disorders, and the field of child and adolescent psychotherapy is in urgent need of a major publication, I find it hard to recommend this 1997 translation as an essential addition to a current library.