Phenomena of Childhood Trauma and Expanding Approaches to Early Intervention

Abstract

Throughout my career, psychoanalytic training has always served three invaluable roles or functions. It has been central to conducting all of my clinical work with patients – whether in consultations, psychoanalysis or psychotherapy; informs all of the teaching and supervision I do as a professor of child and adult psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine; and it has been the basis for developing new treatment approaches that might benefit a substantial number of children and families who are deeply impacted by trauma that results from their exposure to violence and other catastrophic events. The fact that these children and families were both rarely recognized and rarely seen in our consulting rooms or clinics led to the development the Child Development-Community Policing program (CDCP), a psychoanalytically informed collaboration between law enforcement and mental health professionals (Marans, 1996, Marans et al., 1995). The CDCP program involves the cross-training of both professional groups – clinicians learn about the work and role of police officers as sources of order and safety, while police officers learn about the principles of development as a context for considering the impact of the events that require their presence on the lives of children and families. Over the years, the CDCP program has led to new methods of responding collaboratively to potentially traumatic events that occur in homes and neighborhoods (Marans, Smolover, & Hahn, 2012) and has been replicated or served as model for similar law enforcement–mental health partnerships in numerous communities around the United States and abroad. The notion that psychoanalytic principles could be applied to settings beyond the consulting room was not new. My training at the Hampstead Clinic and earlier exposure to psychoanalysis and its applications while growing up made me especially aware of the enormous contributions made by psychoanalysts – Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, August Aichorn, Sally Provence, Sam Ritvo, Edith Jackson, James and Joyce Robertson, Al Solnit, Dale Meers, Mel Lewis, Selma Fraiberg to name but a few – who increased both the recognition and breadth of response to the needs of children whose optimal development was at greatest risk. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.