Customer Reviews

Live Company: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Autistic, Borderline, Deprived and Abused Children

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this book is not about autism but about being human as a therapist and the humanity of very disturbed children..it is about how the author learned over time that the kind of psychoanalytic therapy she had originally tried with an autistic boy was not helpful - and how what she learned from that changed her ways of working with all sorts of disturbed children. Alvarez is a remarkably creative and honest clinican and a wonderful writer.

This book is about the bravest modern work on the subject I have seen. It takes real courage to stand up against the organized scorn of angry mothers of autistic children. Those women will want to kill you if you suggest that autism might be triggered by mistakes in child rearing, and might therefore be curable--or at least alleviated--through psychotherapy. Like it or not, this is what Alvarez is implying. Some reviewers think Temple Grandin is Brave??? What a joke.

One study of different methods of treatment and education for children with autism established that they did worse in psychoanalysis than in any other form of treatment. High-functioning people with autism are usually provoked to laughter or fury by reading psychoanalytic "interpretations" of their behaviour. Anyone genuinely interested in understanding autism should read one of the excellent first-person accounts written by brave and brilliant individuals such as Temple Grandin.