The Adolescent and the Psychotherapist: Why 'I Don’t Know’ Matters
Part of Independent Psychoanalytic Approaches with Children and Adolescents series - more in this series
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : December 2025
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 182
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Child and Adolescent Studies - Catalogue No : 98325
- ISBN 13 : 9781041156291
- ISBN 10 : 1041156294
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This work of collected essays brings together the clinical, theoretical and educational wisdom of one of the foremost child psychoanalytic psychotherapists in the UK, Peter Wilson.
Wilson offers a clear, accessible understanding of adolescence from a psychoanalytic perspective, and highlights the importance of working dynamically. While guiding the reader through work with multiple behavioural and psychic difficulties often presented in the clinical space, he highlights the importance of the therapist not always having the answers. He encourages reflection and exploration, showing the importance of working through the process with one’s adolescents in therapy.
Reviews and Endorsements
Peter Wilson has found a way of both practising and describing a version of psychotherapy with young people that is entirely intelligible and accessible, inspired and inspiring, tentative and confident, humorous and compassionate. With no jargon, and no grandiose claims. Psychoanalysis with young people as a most appealing improvisation, not the earnest routine ideology of virtue that it is all too often presented as being.
Adam Phillips, Child & Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, essayist, author and literary critic
This timely and compassionate book draws deeply on the author's extensive experience of working with young people. It stands as an accessible and much-needed corrective to today’s trend toward manualised approaches and prescriptive action. Instead, the book advocates for open listening, honest self-awareness, and the importance of working as an ally to the developing ‘self’ of the young person who is experiencing conflict. Such work is less about delivering treatment—less about ‘doing’—and more about being alongside: showing interest, recognition, and respect for the natural maturational processes the author so insightfully explores.
Unique in its depth and perspective, this is an essential and scholarly resource on adolescence.
Paul van Heeswyk, Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist
Wilson describes the experience of being and working with adolescence in an unique and compelling way which will resonate with all who work with this age group.
Professor Jeremy Holmes, Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. What evidence works for whom
2. Latency and Certainty
3. "I don't know"
4. Psychotherapy with Adolescents
5. Delinquency
6. Narcissism and Adolescence
7. Me Loves Me: What is this thing called Narcissism? Resistance in Adolescent Psychotherapy
8. The adolescent, the psychoanalyst and the working alliance
9. People meet in a classroom and say Hello
10. Why can't an adolescent be more like an adult? The relationship between adolescent and adulthood
About the Author(s)
Peter Wilson is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist based in London, UK
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