Short description
This groundbreaking volume presents a framework for understanding personality disorders in children, distinguishing them from more frequently diagnosed problems, and delivering effective interventions.
Long description
This book presents a research-based framework for understanding and treating children and adolescents with personality disorders. While these youngsters are notably challenging to engage, often coming across as arrogant, defiant, and manipulative, their demeanor typically masks devastating experiences of vulnerability and pain. Illustrated throughout with compelling clinical examples, the book offers new insight into the nature and origins of disordered personality in childhood, the process by which these disorders develop, and the destructive cycles in which families (and clinicians) become unwittingly ensnared. It delineates a systematic intervention approach that incorporates individual psychotherapy, family treatment, psychoeducational and cognitive techniques, and pharmacotherapy, providing detailed guidelines for implementing each stage of treatment.
Review
'Drawing on the clinical wisdom of psychoanalysis, and blending it with current progress in developmental science, this book reminds us that personality can become disordered at a very early age, with devastating consequences. Treatment requires the skillful blending of a multiplicity of intervention approaches, centered on the therapeutic relationship. This book demonstrates-in the best Menninger tradition-how we can approach such problems effectively from a modern developmental perspective.' - Hans Steiner, MD, Stanford University School of Medicine 'This rewarding text offers practical strategies for clinical work with children and adolescents imprisoned by severe personality disturbances. Bleiberg provides a unique synthesis and application of current thinking about development and interpersonal relationships, incorporating attachment research as well as exciting recent neurobiological findings. In doing so, he lays the foundations for psychotherapeutic and psychopharmacologic interventions that can help young people achieve a more reflective and interpersonally rewarding way of living. The book is comprehensive in its discussion of the phases of treatment, and offers insightful perspectives on crucial countertransference issues. Bleiberg has made an important contribution to theory and practice. I highly recommend this book.' - Daniel J. Siegel, MD, Department of Psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine 'Bleiberg has produced a brilliant, comprehensive, and genuinely innovative work. Presenting an integrated framework for treatment of a complex population of young people, this book retains the most important aspects of the old while presenting exhilarating new perspectives and powerful technical innovations. It offers a rare combination of originality, breadth, conceptual coherence, and clinical wisdom.' - Peter Fonagy, PhD, FBA, University of London and The Menninger Clinic
Table of contents
- Introduction
- Attachment and Reflective Function
- Psychological Organization and the World of Mental Representations
- Trauma, Vulnerability, and the Development of Severe Personality Disorders
- Antisocial and Narcissistic Children and Adolescents
- Histrionic and Borderline Children and Adolescents
- Beginning Treatment
- Creating a Secure Base and a Representational Mismatch
- Early Stages of Treatment
- Forming the Alliance and Enhancing Reflective Function
- Middle and Late Stages of Treatment
- Using Connection to Move toward Integration
- Residential Treatment and the Continuum of Services
- Pharmacological Treatment