The Elusive Child

This all-encompassing and provocative collection of papers focuses on all factors pertaining to the child and childhood, including the role that psychoanalysis has to play.

Fuelled by agitation and panic about paedophilia, child abuse, violence and neglect on the one side, and by children as violent murderers and killers on the other, there has been an explosion of concern regarding the place, care, treatment and life of Children, in Europe and beyond. This broad-ranging and provocative collection of papers, a volume in the Winnicott Studies Monograph Series, focuses on all factors pertaining to the child and childhood, including the role that psychoanalysis has to play. The book offers a unique and fascinating understanding of developmental issues from early infancy through latency and into adolescence from various psychoanalytic approaches. The papers, written by experts in the field examine closely all aspects of this fascinating subject from Freud to Winnnicott; from neo-natal care to adolescence. The contributors take into account issues such as fostering and adoption, vital scrutiny of the role of the family, and presentation of children in the media while all the time asking the salient question, "What is a child?"