When A Child Grieves: Psychoanalytic Understanding and Technique

A book for clinicians who want to improve their ability to understand and treat bereaved children. Corinne Masur provides a thorough exposition of the existing psychoanalytic theory on mourning and an excellent grounding in the technical aspects of seeing bereaved children in psychodynamic treatment. For many years, debate has raged as to whether children are capable of embarking on a true mourning process. In When a Child Grieves, Corinne Masur provides an excellent overview of the myriad psychoanalytic theories on the subject and demonstrates conclusively that children can and do mourn. She describes how children and adolescents experience grief and how the mourning process can go awry. Dr Masur provides ample guidelines for the evaluation and treatment of children and adolescents struggling with their grief, alongside a multitude of clinical examples to illustrate her salient points. One detailed and poignant case history is returned to throughout the book, that of a three-year-old who lost his father to suicide. This sensitive and important work fills a void in the literature and will become a key text for trainees and qualified psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, clinicians, and other professionals working with bereaved children. AUTHOR: Dr Corinne Masur is a licensed clinical psychologist, a child and adult psychoanalyst, an associate supervising child analyst, and an adult supervising psychoanalyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia (PCOP). She has been in private practice, seeing mothers and infants, children of all ages, and adults for over thirty-five years. She is the co-director of The Parent Child Center and a founder of the Philadelphia Center for Psychoanalytic Education (PCPE) and The Philadelphia Declaration of Play, an organisation which advocates for the right of all children to have access to free, imaginative play. She is a member of The Difficult Cases Study Group at PCOP and The Child Relational Study Group of The Institute for Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (IRPP). She is author of the blog Thoughtful Parenting and she has written, lectured, and taught on a variety of subjects including early childhood bereavement, mourning, the denial of death in psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, child development, the development of trust in childhood, the effect of divorce on children. She is the author of Flirting With Death: Psychoanalysts Consider Mortality and editor of Finding the Piggle: Reconsidering D. W. Winnicott's Most Famous Child Case. She is on the faculty at PCOP and is a three-time recipient of the J. Alexis Burland Award for excellence in teaching.