Child Psychotherapy and the Games Children Play

In this thought-provoking book, Celine Maroudas presents an intriguing developmental reappraisal of middle childhood, re-examining psychoanalytic approaches to psychotherapy with this age group and exploring the therapeutic power of games and play therapy in a psychoanalytic setting. 

The book offers a comprehensive review of classic and contemporary views of development in middle childhood, from a historical, philosophical and psychoanalytic perspective, calling into question the classical psychoanalytic concept of the latency period. Throughout the chapters, Maroudas highlights the emotional turbulence, psychic complexity and momentous cognitive and psychosocial development of this critical stage of child development. She argues for a shift in psychodynamic thinking on middle childhood from an emphasis on rigidity, structure and psychosocial dormancy to a focus on flux, change and psychic fragility. Maroudas considers why school-aged children intuitively prefer playing games with rules and boundaries, and looks at how these games might be used as a safe, developmentally-appropriate analytic technique for expressing and exploring violent and visceral anxieties, impulses and passions. Through moving clinical examples and incisive clinical thinking, she shows how these games can serve as a developmentally-appropriate framing structure for expressing and exploring the child’s inner world, alongside the vicissitudes of the transference-countertransference matrix.

Offering a recalibration of the technique and language of child analytic treatment to better fit the unique challenges and needs of middle childhood, Child Psychotherapy and the Games Children Play provides psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, clinical psychologists and educators with vital new insights into this critical stage of child development.