Product Description

Based on the author's own clinical practice and also draws on his innovative style of intuitive discovery and exploration of childhood war and trauma.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #552201 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

Review
"This intuitive approach to treating childhood war trauma in adults began with Heinl's sensitivity to his own post-war childhood and birth...Heinl offers a promising biologically-based approach to experiences that remain difficult or resistant to treatment. Heinl's book should be helpful to mental health professionals working with adult survivors of childhood trauma in psychiatry, counseling, psychology, nursing, social work, and related professions treating childhood trauma. It should be helpful reading to anyone who has experienced trauma during childhood."
-Martha Kent

From the Back Cover
The consequences of war are well known, yet the long-term psychological impact on children of these traumatic experiences has been a neglected topic in therapeutic literature. This book is:
* Designed to help counsellors and therapists working with adults who have suffered war trauma in childhood
* Based on the author's own clinical practice
* Drawn on his innovative style of intuitive discovery and exploration of childhood war trauma
* Makes practical suggestions for mental health professionals working with such patients
* This book will be invaluable to all those working with those who have suffered from childhood war trauma.

About the Author
Peter Heinl is a psychiatrist, psycho and family therapist in private practice in the UK and Germany, and has personal experience of post was trauma.

Customer Reviews

Splintered Innocence by Peter Heinl
A review written by Elizabeth Prickett, Winchester/England:

Although this book has particular relevance for mental health professionals, it is also of great interest to a non-specialist reader like myself. Dr. Hinl's account of the methods he uses to uncover war-induced childhood trauma, occluded from adult consciousness but still crippling adult lives, is riveting and persuasive in itself. But he also opens up two areas of topical significance, even for people who have not suffered in this way. The first is his exploration of the faculty of intuition, which he has learnt to employ and rely on more and more. After a series of brief, and surprising, factual accounts of his procedure in individual cases, he discusses at length the development and rationale of his approach. It emerges that intuition - supported, of course, by long therapeutic experience and a wide background knowledge of wartime conditions, and, one must add, by a perhaps unusual open-minded sensitivity, - has proved its worth again and again in his work. By "its own self-organizing, non-conscious processes" it has been more succesful for him than either logical thinking or hte application of the established psychoanalytical methods.

His claims for the efficacy of being willing to wait in silence for the promptings of intuition to emerge, and then acting on them, are supported by the inclusion in the extensive bibliography at the end of the book of works which record the role of intuition in less personal fields of discovery such as science and mathematics.

His other major message, particularly timely just now, is his wake-up call about the long-lasting, seeping, often unrecognized, after-effects of all forms of war-trauma in infancy. Material damage and shattered economies may be made good in a generation, but there needs to be more recognition of the cruel and sometimes irreversible harm done by war on the psychological development of children,then carried over into their adult lives: brutally severed or distorted early relationships, deprivation from hunger or exposure, homelessness, terror, loss of security at all levels and of any peaceful nurturing or carefree times, all these and the like, take a lasting toll. And those who have suffered such things, unconsciously and through no fault of their own, are less well equipped when they become parents themselves, and so their own children are affected too. All this is NOT solved within a generation.

Thanks to many new strands of thinking, new experiments in peace-building, and books such as this one, realization of these harsh facts is gaining ground. May the day come when it will at last have fully entered the consciousness of leaders and politicians, and will influence radically all international negotiations and strategies.