Child Psychotherapy and the Games Children Play: A Psychoanalytic Toolkit for Middle Childhood

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

This 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, 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 goes on to consider 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.

Celine Maroudas is a senior consultant child and adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist and clinical psychologist, and has worked for many years with children, their parents and with adult patients, in the public sector and in private practice, primarily in Israel. She is a clinical supervisor and teacher in a variety of advanced diploma programmes in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Israel.