Francis Kelly offers a clinical paradigm for the personality assessment of abused or traumatized children via projective instruments - the TAT and Rorschach - and shows how various projective measures and indices can be utilized as sensitive barometers of changes in self-, object, and ego functioning following therapeutic interventions and other corrective experiences. Furthermore, integrating the tenets of trauma theory with those of psychoanalytic theory, he sets this clinical paradigm in a meaningful theoretical context, and draws on both theory and clinical experience to develop a comprehensive psychological composite of the child who has been maltreated.

I. Young Children and the Experience of Trauma and Abuse. 1. The Representational World of the Young Child: The Role of the Four Psychologies. 2. Object Relations Development in Abused and Traumatized Children: Theoretical and Clinical Considerations -- II. The Psychological Representation of Abuse and Trauma. 3. Object Representation Assessment of Children: TAT and Rorschach Research in Relation to the Abused and Traumatized Child. 4. Object Representation Scales. 5. Old Wine in New Bottles -- The Borderline Child Revisited: Contemporary Perspectives on Diagnosis and Assessment. 6. Three Faces of Abuse and Trauma: The Sequelae of Physical, Sexual, and Complex, Chronic Experiences of Maltreatment. 7. The Abused and Traumatized Child: Changes in Object Relations and Ego Functions -- The Influence and Impact of Therapeutic and Mutative Experiences. 8. Object Representations of Abusive and Maltreating Parents: A Tale of Two Women.