From the book "Living Presence" and her other publications, I began to think of Alvarez's work as having a style that is unique to her. She always writes so beautifully about deep, often frightening, attachments. She describes her patients so humanly, explaining how they can be helped despite their terrible alienation, emptiness, and grotesque symptoms. I believe this style of treatment is behind Alvarez's clinical power, along with her ability to find a common human denominator within their terrible, terrible otherness." (Adriana Harris 2009).

Anne Alvarez's unique voice has accompanied us for nearly 50 years. Known for her intensive psychoanalytic work with autistic and other hopeless children, children who had become dead in their relationship to the world in every practical sense; Alvarez writes about her unique engagements with patients in her unique voice, which combines Kleinian theory, developmental psychology, and a rich associative world related to literature, art, and music. Alvarez emphasizes the therapist's ability to be active to the point of expressing concern, respect, and pleasure rather than neutrality, accommodation, and inclusion.

Aner Guvrin and Sharon Ziv-Beiman will talk with Alvarez about her theoretical clinical roots, autistic children and their treatment, empty states, the analyst's use of his or her own identity within the therapeutic encounter, and how new learning and internalization occur even among inaccessible patients. We will try to understand her refusal to give up on the most desperate patients, her refusal to accept that behavioral change is the best one can hope for, and her insistence on connecting with them, one-on-one.

Anne Alvarez, PhD, MACP is a child and adolescent psychologist and a retired psychotherapist at the Autism, Child and Family Service, Tavistock Clinic, London, where she still teaches. She is the author of "Living Presence - Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Autistic Children, Borderline Children, Children Affected by Deprivation and Victims of Abuse" published in Hebrew by Tolamat Sfarim.

She edited with Susan Reed Autism and Personality: Findings from the Tavistock Autism Workshop . A book in her honor, edited by Judith Edwards, entitled Building on the Work of Anne Alvarez was published in 2002. She was a visiting professor at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society in November 2005 and is an honorary member of the California Psychoanalytic Center. Her most recent book, The Thinking Heart: Three Levels of Psychoanalytic Therapy for Children with Disorders, was published in April 2012 by Routledge and in Hebrew by Tolaam Sfar.