This is an excellent book: clear, comprehensive, well-written, and replete with examples that show us how an integration of psychodynamic principles and neurocognitive development makes clinical process richer and more effective. Nechama Sorscher provides us with an up-to-date resource that belongs in every mental health provider’s office.

Marsha Levy-Warren, PhD, NYU, author of The Adolescent Journey

This volume provides a much-needed guide for professionals who seek to expand their knowledge and deepen their understanding about the assessment and treatment of individuals with neurocognitive challenges. By synthesizing an extensive contemporary body of research with her considerable clinical experience, the author provides an integrated view of how neurodevelopmental issues interface with young people’s evolving personality. She uses vignettes of children, adolescents, and young adults to demonstrate the complex ways in which struggles around learning, socializing, and self-regulation powerfully affect the sense of self across the lifespan, posing threats to self-esteem and heightening susceptibility to shame. The author’s combined expertise in both neurocognitive evaluation and psychodynamic psychotherapy yields unique sections that clinicians will find particularly useful, such as: engaging parents in difficult but productive post-evaluation discussions, integrating the results of neurocognitive assessments into dynamically-oriented treatments, addressing the special treatment needs of psychotherapy patients with neurocognitive issues at different phases of their development, recognizing and making use of the transference and countertransference paradigms that tend to arise in the treatment of populations with neurocognitive challenges, and thinking about ways in which the pandemic has left its mark on vulnerable children, adolescents and young adults. This book’s potential as a teaching tool is enhanced by the author’s straightforward and conversational style, a well-organized presentation, and the generous use of clinical material from assessments and psychotherapies.

Pamela Meersand, Columbia University

Nechama Sorscher's debut is an incisive and long overdue addition to our field's literature on the application of psychodynamic theory to assessment practice. Dr. Sorscher's thirty-plus years of specialized experience saturates her work with unmatched insight into this too-frequently overlooked (but in need) clinical population. Her writing style is alacritous yet thoughtful; it is both expansive and accessible. I have long considered Dr. Sorscher a first-rate thinker and clinician. As such, this book presents a rare opportunity for clinicians of all levels of expertise to learn from one of the very best.

Clarice Kestenbaum, MD, Columbia University

Nechama Sorscher's book on neurocognitive challenges in children from a psychodynamic perspective provides a sorely needed integration of the way in which brain and mind intersect. It is a must-read work for clinicians treating such children in therapy. It is an equally important work for those interested in understanding the conceptual links between brain and mind. Most importantly, it is written with a deep humanity and empathy for the patient, parent, and clinician and is thus essential for all of us who work with such children.

Steven Tuber, City College of New York

Written with a refreshing clarity and filled with clinical examples, Nechama Sorscher offers a wonderful contribution to professionals seeking to integrate a child’s neurodevelopmental path into a broader understanding of the child’s social and emotional development. This book will be a fantastic resource for both experienced clinicians and professionals-in-training. Dr. Sorscher’s work offers research and clinically-based integrative approach that furthers our understanding of child development, and most importantly, our capacity to empathize with the children and families who we encounter in our practice.

Henry Kronengold, author of Stories From Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy: A Curious Space

This excellent review of assessment and emotional consequences of neurocognitive challenges includes learning disorders, ADHD, and autism spectrum disorders. The author warns against misattributing emotional and interpersonal problems primarily to psychiatric diagnoses while ignoring neurocognitive origins. The writing is clear, comprehensive, and useful. Dr. Sorscher addresses weaknesses in attention, learning, language, and visual processing, and their effect on reading, writing, math, as well as on self-esteem, identity, avoidance, affect regulation, interpersonal relations, and family problems. There is also a welcome inclusion of strengths of people with neurocognitive problems. Issues come alive through clinical examples, discussion of how to give feedback to parents, and methods for testing, remediation, and accommodation.

Daniel Gensler, William Alanson White Institute