"Untying The Knot" sets out to present a clinical approach to cases where the referred patient is a child or adolescent, but in which the parents are intimately involved in the therapeutic situation. Dr Brafman emphasizes the refusal to be bound by rigid notions of treatment modalities, and to go to the heart of the matter--an undestanding of the child's own confusion and pain, and then, through its elucidation and expression, to bring relief.

This book is based on questions that all parents have about their children and that they might want to ask a childcare professional, if they were given the chance. Children's relationships with their parents, their relationship with siblings and outside world are discussed in detail as well as questions on what is normal behaviour and when help should be sought. There are no set rules for raising children but certain situations might be better resolved after learning about other similar cases and hearing a professional's advice.
Drawing from his extensive experience as a child...

Freud's psychoanalysis and its original representative in the UK, the British Psychoanalytic Society, have gone through unavoidable developments over the decades of their existence. We now have innumerable organizations training professionals in very diverse forms of psychodynamic therapies and it can be difficult to recognize the original sources of their theories and practices.

This multiplication of trainings has led to an ever-increasing number of theoretical postulates that have come to be adopted as dogmas. Examples are transference and counter-transference, negative...

If a person is struggling with feelings that involve pain or anxiety, then we find a complex network of difficulties affecting that person's capacity to express what torments him. Whatever the person's age, they very often have no access to the words that might convey their internal conflicts. People interacting with that person may believe he is deliberately refusing to express what affects him, but it is certainly true that most times this is not the case.

When dealing with children, these difficulties are even more acute. Many years ago it was found that children often...

The book describes a series of cases where the child's presenting complaint is seen to be the expression of an underlying emotional conflict that the child expects the parents to understand and help him or her overcome. The parents' interpretation of the child's symptoms cannot but be influenced by their own previous life experiences and if their eventual response does not meet the child's anxiety, the child feels misunderstood and the physical complaint remains unchanged. It can also happen that the parents' interpretation of the symptoms reinforces the child's belief of carrying a serious...