ABSTRACT
The three chapters by Jane Cassidy, Agathe Gretton, and Jackie Hall focus on work with the individual child. While Gretton stresses the overwhelming challenge that the developmental tasks of adolescence represent for depressed children, Cassidy's main emphasis is on "working through in the countertransference" (Brenman Pick, 1985), and Hall concentrates on the technical problem of phrasing interventions in a way most likely to support the child's sense of autonomy. Each of the young people we hear about comes over very much as an individual. What greater contrast could there be than that between Gretton's patients Sarah and Samantha—the one vividly present, larger than life; the other elusively always on the point of vanishing, both physically and emotionally? Add to these individual differences the cultural differences that emerged between treatment centres, as well as the inevitable differences in emphasis between treatment modalities and even between supervisors within a given treatment modality, and any attempt at generalizing from the clinical work in the Childhood Depression Project begins to look like a daunting task.
