Written for tumultuous times, this volume offers fresh and valuable psychoanalytic reflections on traumatized childrens play and on how wars/climate change/pandemics inflect psychic development. Breaking with psychoanalysiss omertà around naming the genocide of Palestinian children and trans youth, Fiorellas bold and erudite collection tracks fantasies about blown-off limbs growing back, impending disablements by climate change/pandemics, and trans childrens anxieties about being erased. It also necessarily reveals how adults fail children, children wounded not only by bombs, disease, and rising temperatures, but also by adults lies, greed, narcissism, and inaction. Never has Winnicotts theres no such thing as a baby been such a searing indictment.
Avgi Saketopoulou, Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York, USA.
This is a powerful and precious book. The contributors have gone undaunted into the darkest of places and seen some terrible sights. Someone had to do it and thanks to these brave psychoanalysts, now someone has. They have much to teach us.
Anne Alvarez, Consultant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, London, UK.
It is an essential task for psychoanalysis to contemplate the precarity of human existence in a world under threat of extinction, a pandemic, and endless wars. The social-political circumstances of our lives are as fundamental to who we are as the dynamics of our families of origins, doubly so when they are traumatic. This book explores the condition of the most vulnerable humans: children. It is written by people who have been meeting them in some of the most devastating trauma zones. It is a gift, and a demand that we pay close attention and do what we can.
Eyal Rozmarin, psychoanalyst, New York, USA.
