Live Company

"My last two choices represent some of the finest and most influential work currently available in a continually evolving field. First of all, Live Company by Anne Alvarez remains a seminal choice both for experienced clinicians and those starting out in the practitioner field. Alvarez, whose early thinking was based on many years of working with a particular autistic patient, is characteristically honest about how we all develop through our mistakes rather than our successes. She addresses, among many other essential topics, the importance of differentiating potency from omnipotence, and idealisation as a development rather than a defence in the treatment of children whose lives may then emerge from the despair generated by early experience. How can one go about reclaiming a mind? Alvarez’s work is always underpinned by clinical examples, and offers different and thought-provoking takes on ‘classic’ ideas, such as the meaning of play as seen by Freud and Klein, in a chapter called ‘Beyond the Unpleasure Principle’. The title of her book is a reflection not only of what the baby needs to grow, but of what we all need in order to take our thinking forward in a way which makes sense, and which works, in the company of our own ‘good objects’. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"