Child Analyst Research Articles

An Interview with Jan Wiener.Conducted by Linda Carter on January 7, 2024.

Jan Wiener is a Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) trained Jungian analyst and Journal of Analytical Psychology Board member, highly esteemed in Jungian and psychoanalytic circles for her work as a practitioner, teacher, supervisor and writer as well as for her well-honed leadership skills, notably as a member of the executive committee and as a vice-president of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), the international organizing body for Jungian analysts worldwide. Jan has made remarkable contributions to the personal and professional development of Jungians not only in the UK but also for those involved in the IAAP Developing Groups programme where she has been a pioneer, providing cross-cultural outreach to those seeking training in Russia, Taiwan, Serbia, Ukraine and Denmark. Success in Jan's many-faceted and full life has been facilitated by a natural authenticity, good sense of humour, hearty laugh and a welcoming attitude; these attributes have significantly aided in bridge-building and opening space for creative interactions within and between individuals and groups. Her development was influenced by a history of parents who fled from Vienna and Berlin to London, escaping persecution by the pre-war Nazi regime. Jan's aunt lived in close proximity and was a child analyst who worked closely with Anna Freud. As a young woman, Jan swam the English Channel and she has always been a sports lover, especially tennis. Her many talents extend to music and she is a trained opera singer who has recently been involved in an affordable educational programme in Cratoule, France, that fosters the expanding growth of amateurs who have the opportunity to learn from more established, experienced attendees. Jan has performed as a singer in addition to presenting her analytic work globally. She has many publications that centre around clinical practice, her forte. Well-known by those who have been in relationship with Jan personally and professionally is her exceptional capacity for presence in the moment while holding the long-view; this capacity as well as an inclusive attitude, perhaps born in part from family history, along with a keen intelligence, intuition and native talent, have led to a life-long commitment to service and generative partnerships that continue to bear fruit amongst those touched by her kind and generous soul.

The Plight of the Child in Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Achakasara

This paper examines the ordeal of the Victorian English and Postcolonial Cameroonian children through the lenses of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Achakasara. Child abuse cuts across universality, timelessness, racial and gender constructs. The child in these two societal backgrounds undergoes untold suffering perpetrated by adults and their fellow children. They are exploited for commercial purposes, at the expense of their education and wellbeing. They experience physical assault through undeserved beating under the guise of domestic correction with pending eventualities being psychological trauma. A continuity of intentional abuse consciously impacts the child to view his place of birth and development as a problem. That child sees the streets as a better option. Very high probability abounds that these streets are not suitable for the developmental processes of the child but at that point, his/her actions are shaped by convictions. Dickens and Nkengasong take interest what happens to a child, in their respective societies. They pen with certainty that conventional Victorian England and contemporary Postcolonial Cameroonian societies are fraught with different shades of injustices, jeopardising the future of the younger generations. This paper is vehiculated by the Psychoanalytic theory, with focus on Anna Freud’s dimension of Psychoanalysis. Anna Freud is a child psychoanalyst concerned with the upbringing of children. The purpose of this paper is to portray the various abuses experienced by the child as demonstrated in Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Nkengasong’s Achakasara.

The tale of two sisters

What damage is done to the psyche of children who are lied to about their origins? This is a unique tale of two half-sisters who were deceived about their blood relationship and its effect can still be felt today within the history of psychoanalysis. The key players within this drama that ended in the murder of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth are Antonia Hug (1894–1915), Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (1871–1924), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Isidor Sadger (1869–1942), and Hermine's illegitimate nephew Rolph Hug (1906–?) who murdered her. The early historians of psychoanalysis declined to mention her (Jones, 1953; Gay, 1988). We are indebted to Graf-Nold (1988) and MacLean and Rappen (1991) who have brought to our attention that Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was the first Viennese child psychoanalyst who made a remarkable contribution to understanding the psyche of women and children.

Francoise Dolto, the French Child Psychoanalyst Emerging from the Shadows

ABSTRACT This text attempts to underscore the significant role of Francoise Dolto, the French child psychoanalyst, working with traumatized children during and after World War II. Being mostly known as a friend and colleague of Jacques Lacan, her own original clinical work was often overshadowed by the more prominent psychoanalysts on the French scene. Francoise Dolto could be considered as working in a relational mode, but more importantly, she truly put the concept of the symbolic to work, speaking to infants from the beginnings of their lives in an adult language, always invoking and including the instance of the law and the Third in her analytic work.

Françoise Dolto Between Relational Thinking and Freudian Metapsychology

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to present the work of the French child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto (1908–1988) and to explore possible contributions to current debates in relational psychoanalysis. We present the historical and conceptual relationship between relational psychoanalysis and French psychoanalysis. Within this context, we will discuss certain key concepts (e.g., unconscious body image, need and desire, symbolic castrations) of Dolto who, in our view, provides an intersubjective understanding of the unconscious that resembles current relational approaches such as Jessica Benjamin’s theory of recognition. We shall discuss Dolto’s embodied understanding of the unconscious and the role of language and intercorporeal resonance and will compare it to Benjamin’s relational approach.

The Growth of Desire in Intersubjective Space

ABSTRACT Contrasting the work of French child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto with that of American Relational theorist Jessica Benjamin yields significant shared sensibilities, notably regarding what was in Dolto’s context a radical assertion of the small child as subject who needed to be considered as such, and the role of the parent’s relating and communications in nurturing both subjectivity and agentic desire. However, Benjamin’s writing makes clear not only that the parent’s subjectivity is central to the child’s affective experience, but the waysthe child’s subjectivity takes shape in response to the mix of attunement, rupture, acknowledgment and repair. This makes parenting both riskier and more intimate; children can experience recognition that is inherently mutual, but are also more vulnerable to parental failures of both responsiveness and self-regulation. Relational perspectives are also considered regarding conscious and unconscious parental transmissions as they influence the development of a child’s desire.

Working as a Child Analyst in a Community Daycare Program

ABSTRACT The work described illustrates the importance of active playing in childhood as a subjective activity from age two-and-one-half years up to at least five years old, as a means of communicating nonverbally, especially when words are not yet readily available. It is a young child’s way of exploring the world and his own interests, while also communicating what matters to him emotionally. It requires adults to translate and understand what playing communicates and actually means, and why it matters emotionally. Playing enhances relationships and is useful in conveying and furthering interpersonal understanding, gradually becoming ever more verbal.

A Model for a Psychoanalytically Informed Preschool

ABSTRACT This paper is about my journey into unfamiliar territories as a child analyst when I was asked to direct a psychoanalytically oriented preschool project known as the Early Childhood Mental Health Program in a high-risk community in San Francisco. This ambitious project required knowledge of racial and class challenges and the way I approached it was to say: I am here to learn about you and your community. In the first six months, I sat in the classrooms and met with the director on a weekly basis. What follows is what I learned and how I think our mental health team was effective in having a strong therapeutic impact on the school environment, the teaching staff, and the families. By the third year of the project, the school environment was transformed into a growth-promoting, good-enough caregiving environment where attachment relationships developed between the children and the teaching staff. This model of early childhood mental health intervention/prevention in a high-risk community can be replicated in other public preschool settings. Even though, initially, this model requires significant funding, in the long run it is an economically advisable way to prevent a significant number of at-risk children from ending up in special ed programs or in the juvenile court system at great cost to the community and state.

An Introduction to the Papers – Child Analysts in the Community – Daycare and Preschool Consultation and On-Site Services

ABSTRACT Psychoanalysts have increasingly sought opportunities to move beyond their consultation rooms to find ways to provide service from a psychoanalytic point of view where it could be well utilized. While there is a long tradition of these endeavors, such as Freud’s free clinics, for child analysts searching for ways to provide service and support for young children and for those who care for them has long been an ideal. This section introduction strives to provide context and rationale for this important work. Support for the child’s development of improved verbalization of affect and social and emotional development more broadly are noted. As well, a brief (and necessarily incomplete) review of the history of such efforts and reference to attempts to undertake research regarding efficacy and efforts to establish best practices is provided.

Back to the future: when children and adolescents return to office sessions following episodes of teletherapy.

Analysts and psychotherapists are beginning to have more thorough and probing discussions about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected their work. Shifting to online teletherapy has been necessary due to the public health measures put in place to curtail the spread of the virus. Much of the existing literature addresses how using online platforms for teletherapy works for adults. This paper instead looks at its effects on working with children and adolescents. A contrast between Winnicott's notion of holding and Bion's concept of container-contained is reviewed through a summary of a paper by Ogden. This author finds that holding might be more applicable to online work during a pandemic when the collective relationship to time and its usual parameters is severely upended. Containing could be more arduous and challenging online due to the lack of embodied presence to communicate and detect tiny nonverbal cues. A short questionnaire affirms that child analysts and psychotherapists have struggled with dimensions of online work that are particular to the developmental levels of their patients. Further, teletherapy may often not be a good fit for someone with learning differences.

René Spitz’s Empty Frames: ‘Hospitalism’, Screen Analysis and the Birth of Infant Psychiatry

This article casts light on the origins of infant psychiatry by taking a new, interdisciplinary approach to the work of psychoanalyst and film-maker René Spitz. Focusing on his observations of babies living in orphanages, it argues that by undertaking the difficult, and sometimes paradoxical, task of capturing emotional absence and psychological fragmentation on film, Spitz created a new and influential theory of the infant psyche. It considers how this vision of an indeterminate and potentially ‘empty’ infant subject was generated by the institutional care which he sought to undermine. The particular ways in which the institution emerges as a problem and opportunity for child analysts after World War II propelled Spitz into a surprising range of post-war debates on cultural politics. He is revealed as embedded in a complex, interdisciplinary web of discourse, practices and observational strategies, and at the centre of post-war visual research into the environmental origins of mental illness.

Child dying from cancer: Child psychiatrist dad sheds light on how to help

Written by a child psychoanalyst, A Short Good Life documents the author's life with his daughter, Liza, during the two years after she contracted leukemia until her death at the age of 6. The book is not sentimental, but heart‐rending. Twenty‐five years have passed since Liza died, but the pain remains; still, so does the learning, and the many lessons for parents and, especially, the health care system in the way it handles both parents and patients during this process.

Book sheds light on how to help child dying from cancer, by child psychiatrist dad

Written by a child psychoanalyst, A Short Good Life documents the author's life with his daughter, Liza, during the two years after she contracted leukemia until her death at the age of six. The book is not sentimental, but heart‐rending. Twenty‐five years have passed since Liza died, but the pain remains; still, so does the learning, and the many lessons for parents and, especially, the health care system in the way it handles both parents and patients during this process.

Psychoanalysis by the Numbers: What Bearing Does Frequency of Sessions Have on the Education and Training of Child Psychoanalytic Candidates?

ABSTRACT In 2018, the IPA and the APsaA changed their training requirements for graduation for child and adolescent candidates. The modified standards permitted constituent societies and institutes who followed the traditional Eitington training model to offer their candidates the choice of treating one or more of their supervised cases at a frequency of 3 times per week, rather than the traditional four or five times per week. Controversy over the issue of frequency had preceded this change and has continued after the change. The author attempts to discuss all sides of the debate, addressing the benefits and the costs of each level of frequency. In the absence of good research on this question, the author asked experienced child analysts and some candidates to weigh in with their experiences and opinions. Some areas of consensus as well as areas of disagreement emerged.

Ralph Greenson’s Child Analytic Understanding and Technique: A Heuristic Examination

ABSTRACT Despite Ralph Greenson not being a child analyst, his two papers on the analysis of a gender-disordered boy offer a heuristic opportunity to consider current controversies in child analysis. Thus, his material is examined in terms of current considerations about how to understand and work with such disturbances, the distinctions between being a developmental object and providing a corrective emotional experience, the role and place of play in clinical technique, the analyst’s role as a real object, and the importance of promoting a sense of self-agency in child analysis. Greenson’s relatively sophisticated dynamic formulation of the boy’s gender issues is contrasted with his unidimensional technical approach with its deemphasis of insight into and articulation of the boy’s internal/subjective world. This approach limited the boy’s opportunity to achieve insightfulness and to terminate analysis with a sense of self-agency. It also could have left him vulnerable to later depression during adolescence because he never realized or mastered the complex emotions, conflicts, and relationship with his parents that contributed to his wishes to be and act like a girl. Instead, he altered his behavior to comply with his analyst’s wish that he act in a stereotypically masculine way.

Trauma in child psychotherapy: some thoughts around a concept

ABSTRACT This paper offers an exploration of the notion of trauma, viewing it as an ‘elastic’ concept that has changed over time within psychoanalytic theory, including in child psychotherapy. There is an argument for a multi-faceted, developmental, individual way of viewing trauma, taking into account contemporary knowledge about psychic trauma while at the same time not losing sight of some psychoanalytic ideas that were central in the formation of the term. This paper argues for the importance of reclaiming and holding onto certain Freudian elements of what trauma means, including the idea that structural/ontological trauma in the course of human life is necessary and developmentally important, and is differentiated from historical trauma, which is linked to a particular event. These different ways of thinking about trauma are explored through presenting the work of French child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto.

The trouble with research-creation: failure, play and the possibility of knowledge in aesthetic encounters

This paper reflects on a research-creation project that investigates the ways in which surveillance is experienced by youth as an embodiment that might be difficult to articulate in words but rather expressed affectively, through emotion and social practice. Our argument is that the aesthetic intervention provoked by research-creation can instantiate encounters that capture surveillance as an ineffable experience of everyday life. We situate our methodological claims in a concrete case study that considers youth engagement with a commissioned contemporary art project. Drawing on the writings of child and youth psychoanalyst W.D. Winnicott, we theorize the importance of a facilitating environment to create the conditions for young people to freely and playfully express meanings they make in their encounters with art. Research-creation suggests a perspective of resistance and failure as productive and constitutive of the possibilities of coming to know, both for the research subjects and ultimately for the authors in their orientation to research inquiry.

Connecting with Children and Adolescents and Deepening Psychoanalytic Treatment: Creative Possibilities for In-Session Use of Digital Media and Devices

ABSTRACT Historically, child psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically-oriented child therapists have used games, toys, and art materials creatively to engage their patients, facilitate connection, and deepen treatment. Over the past two decades, screens and digital devices have become increasingly pervasive in the play and lives of children and adolescents. Although there are some well-founded concerns about the potential negative effects of screens and digital devices on child development, I take the position that the child analyst’s attitude toward electronic devices needs to shift from whether to use them in treatment to how to use them. In this article, I offer a series of case examples showing how screens and digital devices can be used in-session in productive ways akin to how child analysts have always used their creativity to engage with their patients.

Digital Technology and the Third Reality: Its Ubiquitous Presence in the Analytic Space

ABSTRACT The use of digital technology by children, adolescents, and adults is now ubiquitous. Unfortunately, many child analysts have had little training in how to understand and work when their young patients introduce such technology into the clinical setting. In this article, I present two cases describing my work with latency-age children who engaged with me using digital modalities. Separated by almost a decade, the two cases together exemplify how the interaction among technological advances, changing cultural attitudes, and my personal and professional development impacted how I worked with each child. I discuss the importance of tuning into emergence and use of digital technology in the analytic space, which I refer to as the “third reality,” which is separate from the child’s experiences of his/her inner world and environment. I demonstrate how allowing my child patients to access digital devices and media within sessions facilitated more meaningful connection, deeper exploration of identities, and opportunities for expression and transformation of powerful feelings. I emphasize the importance of these analytic encounters in influencing the developmental trajectory of my professional identity.

Introduction - In-Session Use of Digital Material in Child Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

ABSTRACT This section on digital media in child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy is intended to help fill in a gap in the psychoanalytic literature where much more has been written about the cultural and developmental impact of the digital revolution compared to conceptualization and intervention in clinical work with children and adolescents who wish to access digital media within sessions. In this introductory article, I provide a preview of the section’s articles by four experienced psychoanalytic child clinicians. Each author-clinician offers multiple case illustrations and commentaries on the formulations that undergird their inventions with child and adolescent patients who sought to bring digital devices and media directly into treatment sessions. The hope is that this section will inspire other child analysts and therapists to write about their experiences on treatment’s digital frontier and thus expand our literature on this topic that is of vital importance in contemporary practice.