Abstract
AbstractWhat can psychoanalysts do to prevent transmission of trauma? One way is to improve the lot of children whose fate is in the hands of society, particularly those in foster care. The repetition compulsion is a psychoanalytic hypothesis which predicts that foster children carry within them behavioral memories of being rejected, neglected, or harmed by their families of origin. Children's enactments of these memories dispose their foster families to recreate the events, reject the troubled children, and produce further traumatic discontinuities of care. This psychoanalytic concept can be operationalized within social service systems. An aspect of repetition compulsion of foster children is measurable by tracking the number of transfers between foster homes. The phenomenon can be substantially reduced by focused psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy of the children and their caregivers (Kliman, 1996). Remarkably, there is statistically significant evidence that children's IQ are enhanced by a certain form of intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the preschool years (Kliman, 1968, 1970, 1997; Zelman and Samuels, 1996; Hope, 1999). Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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