Being Alive: Building on the Work of Anne Alvarez

241 Pages·2003·8.23 MB·English

by  Judith Edwards

Being Alive
Anne Alvarez is an enormously influential psychoanalytic psychotherapist
whose work on autism and severe personality disorders in children has been
important internationally. Her book Live Company has been a source of
inspiration over the years both for colleagues and generations of students.
Her work is celebrated here by a group of distinguished psychoanalytic
practitioners from around the world.
Being Alive brings together assessment of Alvarez's work and evaluation of
how her seminal ideas have influenced contemporary thinking and practice.
Working from her experience with autistic, borderline and deprived children,
she has been a bridge between schools of thought and academic disciplines.
These chapters illustrate with both theoretical debate and clinical examples
how each individual has been able to build on or connect up with her ideas to
enrich their own work. It includes chapters linking different lines of thinking
within psychoanalysis, demonstrating too how converging ideas from other
disciplines such as neurobiology have borne out Alvarez's changes of tech
nique in the consulting room. We live in exciting times, as is seen more and
more in terms of cutting-edge research on the brain and in the way such
research develops how the psychological affects the physical and how diffi
culties encountered early in life are addressed in an approach, advocated by
Alvarez, which combines both a psychoanalytic and a developmental view.
This book will be of great interest to child and adolescent psychotherapists in
training and practice, and also to clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts and
psychiatrists working with autistic/severely disturbed children.
Judith Edwards is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist at the
Tavistock Clinic, and until 1999 was joint editor of the Journal of Child
Psychotherapy.
Photograph by Al Alvarez
Being Alive
Building on the work of Anne Alvarez
Collected and edited by
Judith Edwards
First published 2001 by Brunner-Routledge
This edition published 2013 by Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Taylor & Francis Inc
711 Third Avenue, New York NY 10017
Rout/edge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an imforma business
© 2001 Judith Edwards
Typeset in Times by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, orother means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Being alive: building on the work of Anne Alvarez / [edited by] Judith Edwards.
p. cm.
"List of publications by Anne Alvarez": p.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 1-58391-130-8 -ISBN 1-58391-131-6 (pbk.)
1. Child analysis. 2. Developmental psychology. 3. Alvarez, Anne, 1936-.
4. Alvarez, Anne, 1936-Bibliography. 5. Autistic children. 6. Borderline personality
disorder in children. I. Alvarez, Anne, 1936-. II. Edwards, Judith, 1944-.
RJ504.2 .B44 2001
618.92'8917-dc21
2001035707
ISBN: 978-1-583-91130-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-583-91131-0 (pbk)
And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn ...
So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes ...
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights ...
Czeslaw Milosz, Collected Works
(Reproduced by kind permission of Penguin Books)
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Contents
Notes on contributors IX
Foreword X111
Acknowledgements XX111
Introduction XXV
PART I
Mainly theoretical 1
1 Bridging the Atlantic for psychoanalysis: an appreciation
of the contributions of Anne Alvarez 3
Neil Altman
2 Changing ideas of change: the dual components of
therapeutic action 14
Peter Fonagy
3 A contribution to a technical frame of reference 32
Anne-Marie Sandler
4 Bisexual qualities of the psychic envelope 44
Didier Houzel
5 Neurobiology, developmental psychology, and psychoanalysis:
convergent findings on the subject of projective identification 57
Allan N. Schore
viii Contents
PART II
Mainly clinical
6 "Think outside, not inside": making an interpretation hearable 77
Peter Blake
7 From freezing to thawing: working towards the depressive position
in long-term therapy with autistic patients 89
Bianca Lechevalier-Haiin
8 Deficits in the object and failures in containment 102
Maria Teresa Gallo
9 Thoughts about the concepts of cognitive development,
reparation and the "manic position": two clinical examples 115
Gabriella Pansini
10 The sense of abundance in relation to technique 128
Maria Rhode
11 Liking liking doing 141
Elsa First
12 First love unfolding: developmental and psychoanalytic
perspectives on first relationships and their significance in
clinical work 153
Judith Edwards
13 Glimpses of what might have been: a traumatised autistic boy's
struggle to have a mind 166
Trudy Klauber
14 On temporal shapes: the relation between primary rhythmical
experience and the quality of mental links 179
Suzanne Maiello
Anne Alvarez's published work 195
Author Index 199
Subject Index 203
Notes on contributors
Neil Altman (USA) is co-chairperson of the Relational Orientation Post
doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York
University, and co-editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues: A Journal of
Relational Perspectives. He is faculty and supervisor in the child analytic
training program at the National Institute for Psychotherapies, and
supervisor in the child analytic training program at the William Alanson
White Institute.
Peter Blake (Australia) is a senior clinical psychologist and a Tavistock
trained child psychotherapist. Over the last thirty years he has worked in
child and family teams in community health centres in England and
Australia. He is the Foundation President of the Child Psychoanalytic
Foundation, which is a charity based in Sydney, Australia. He is course
director of the Sydney Observation Course and the Sydney child
psychotherapy training, which is linked to the Tavistock Clinic. He is
editor of the Child Psychoanalytic Gazette, has lectured in a number of
Australian universities and is currently an honorary lecturer at the
University ofWollongong. He is now in private practice in Sydney.
Judith Edwards (Great Britain) is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psy
chotherapist who has recently completed a four-year term as joint editor
of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy. She is an academic tutor on the
child psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic, and she also teaches
child development research both at the Clinic and in Bristol. Her current
clinical base is at a family consultation centre. Recent publications, apart
from those in academic journals, include chapters on autism and on
international developments in the Handbook of Child Psychotherapy:
Psychoanalytic Approaches (eds Horne and Lanyado, Routledge 1999)
and in Autism and Personality (Alvarez and Reid, Routledge 1999).
Elsa First is an associate in Clinical psychiatry and core faculty member of
the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center's Parent/Infant Psy
chotherapy Program, and is an Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor of