Main description:

Building on relational conceptualizations of enactment and on developmental research that attests to the role of embodied, nonverbal language in the meanings children impute to their experiences, Sebastiano Santostefano offers this compelling demonstration of effective child therapy conducted in the "great outdoors." Specifically, he argues that, for the child, traumatic life-metaphors should be resolved at an embodied rather than an exclusively verbal level; they should be resolved, that is, as they are enacted between child and therapist. To this end, child and therapist must take advantage of all the indoor and outdoor environments available to them. As they take therapy to nontraditional places, relying on the nonverbal vocabulary they have constructed together, they move toward enacted solutions to relational crises, solutions that revise the child's sense of self and ability to form new and productive relationships.

Contents:

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.