Child Therapy in the Great Outdoors

"Santostefano has written a groundbreaking, brilliant, highly readable, and well-reasoned work in support of the argument that effective child therapy needs to move beyond traditional language-based modalities and into the arena of embodiment. This idea that thoughts, beliefs, desires, wishes, and affects arise from bodily interactions with the world has become increasingly central to developmental psychology, and Santostefano does a first-rate job of articulating its therapeutic implications, including the nonverbal interactions and enactments it entails. While the author speaks most directly to the child therapist, the book will be highly valuable for all change agents, including adult therapists, parents, educators, and most broadly, all students of human development."- Willis F. Overton, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Temple University“Santostefano's thinking, grounded in developmental theory and contemporary relational psychoanalytic ideas, emphasizes both the intimate involvement of the body in the child’s construction of meaning and the evocative power that different environments may have for a child. He is a skilled and creative clinician who anchors each step of his theory-building in the closely observed, richly described nitty-gritty of extended case illustrations.” - Jay Frankel, Ph.D., Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues

• Interacting and Enacting with a Therapist and Environments: The Path to the Pathway of Change. Ernest: I Detached My Embodied Self from Relationships Because of the Pain and Emotional Deprivation I Experienced. Vera: Abandoned at the Doorstep of an Orphanage, I Battled the Abuse I Embodied to Gain My Freedom. Ernest and Vera from the Vantage Point of Environmental Psychology and Ecopsychology. A Psychoanalytic-Relational-Developmental Model for Conducting Child Psychotherapy. Environments, Interactions, and Embodied Meanings: Probing How Three Are One.