The Elusive Child

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. Psychoanalysis recognition of the continuing importance of childhood and the child, and its central place in the lives of adults, is a continuing challenge to adults' claims to know themselves and the world.

- Lesley Caldwell, from the Introduction

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 - including Alain Vanier, Catherine Mathelin, Abrahao Brafman and Monica Lanyado - examine closely all aspects of this fascinating subject from Freud to Winnicott; from neonatal 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?"