Playing Hard at Life: A Relational Approach to Treating Multiply Traumatized Adolescents (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781138005624)

Playing Hard at Life brings contemporary relational thinking to bear on the psychodynamic treatment of a notably difficult group of young patients. Working with New York City teenagers who have survived the wars of inner-city life and Israeli teenage soldiers who have survived the wars of the Middle East, author Etty Cohen documents the extraordinary challenges of forming a treatment alliance with these shattered youngsters, of engaging them psychodynamically, and of working toward a viable termination. The result is not only a poignant record of courage and committment (on the part of patient and therapist alike), but also a valuable extension of modern trauma theory to adolescence as a developmental stage with its own challenges and requirements.

Again and again, the reader is shocked by just how much happened to these adolescents, astonished at how resilient they proved to be, and, finally, moved by how much Cohen was able to accomplish with them. Her relational approaches to these treatments, teamed with her realization that work with multiply traumatized adolescents cannot be structured in the manner of conventioanl therapy, makes this book an invaluable, timely, and deeply sobering contribution to the literature.