Psychotherapy with Infants and Young Children: Repairing the Effects of Stress and Trauma on Early Attachment

Alicia F. Lieberman · Patricia Van Horn

Apr 2008 · Guilford Press

About this ebook

This eloquent book presents an empirically supported treatment that engages parents as the most powerful agents of their young children's healthy development. Child–parent psychotherapy promotes the child's emotional health and builds the parent's capacity to nurture and protect, particularly when stress and trauma have disrupted the quality of the parent–child relationship. The book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework together with practical strategies for combining play, developmental guidance, trauma-focused interventions, and concrete assistance with problems of living. Filled with evocative, "how-to-do-it" examples, it is grounded in extensive clinical experience and important research on early development, attachment, neurobiology, and trauma.

About the author

Alicia F. Lieberman, PhD, is Irving B. Harris Professor of Infant Mental Health and Vice Chair for Academic Affairs in the Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, and is Director of the Child Trauma Research Project at San Francisco General Hospital. She directs the Early Trauma Treatment Network, a collaborative of four university-based programs that is a center of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Child Traumatic Stress Network. She is president of the board of directors of Zero to Three: The National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. Dr. Lieberman is the author of The Emotional Life of the Toddler and senior author of Losing a Parent to Death in the Early Years: Guidelines for the Treatment of Traumatic Bereavement in Infancy and Early Childhood and Don’t Hit My Mommy!: A Manual for Child-Parent Psychotherapy with Young Witnesses of Family Violence, among numerous other publications. Her major interests include infant mental health, early trauma, and closing the service gap for minority and underserved young children and their families.

Patricia Van Horn, JD, PhD, is Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and Associate Director of the Child Trauma Research Project. She serves as technical assistance provider and clinical consultant to the San Francisco Safe Start Initiative and has trained clinicians nationally and abroad in child-parent psychotherapy through the SAMHSA National Child Traumatic Stress Network and the Safe Start Promising Practices Initiative. She is the author of a child trauma training curriculum for advocates serving women and children affected by domestic violence and a coauthor of Don’t Hit My Mommy! and Losing a Parent to Death in the Early Years.