Psychoanalysis Of Children Research Articles

Psychoanalysis of young children with autism spectrum disorders. An adaptation of technique in the approach to three cases

ABSTRACT At present, the therapeutic approach for young children with autism spectrum disorder is a major challenge for child psychoanalysis. These patients place us in a special clinical and metapsychological terrain with its own characteristics and call our technique into question. What tools do we have for working in situations where speech has not yet acquired a communicative value? How can we intervene when an experiential subject has still not been constituted? How can psychoanalysis benefit these patients? The purpose of this paper is to show an adaptation of technique in the treatment of three children who came to my practice between the ages of two and three with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. In this context, there were certain elements that in the affective proximity of the transference bond which encouraged the child's openness to representational world and a progressive psychic structuring and subjectivation. These elements were the analyst's active search for an encounter with the child, the non-verbal exchanges between analyst and patient, and the characteristics of the interpretations.

What does it mean to ‘play’ in analysis?

ABSTRACT Playing’ in analysis within the frame of the post-Bionian theory of the analytic field has to do with a) listening to the discourse of the unconscious as if virtually everything reflected the dream of the couple or the analytic field, b) interpreting the process of analysis not as rectifying transference distortions but as promoting emotional transformations, c) using a simplestyle of conversation with the patient. In the new paradigm of psychoanalysis, which can be defined no longer as epistemic but as ontological, i.e. directed not so much to unveiling repressed contents as to promoting new psychic functions, the psychoanalysis of children, in which play has such an important place, serves as a model for the psychoanalysis of adults. The concepts of activity, vitality, intensity, curiosity, pleasure, exploration, spontaneity, openness, etc., become elements that ideally should be present in any analysis. In the play, everything is fiction and it is played à deux. Playing serves to make the mind grow through moments of affective attunement (at-one-ment). Hence the need for the analyst to have the conceptual instruments useful to intuit at the highest possible degree of resolution what is happening on the unconscious and shared level of the relationship.

Introduction - Analytic Work in the Pandemic

ABSTRACT When the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic became apparent in March 2020, questions about the role teletherapy could play in mental health treatments and psychoanalysis of children and adolescents suddenly moved from the hypothetical – can it work? – to the essential – how will it work? The two papers in this section provide an early snapshot showing challenges and possibilities brought about by the necessity of moving to distance technologies to preserve and protect analytic work despite the global crisis.

Between Instincts and Intelligence: The Precarious Sciences of Child Identity in Twentieth-Century Britain

The psychoanalysis of children began to flourish in the 1920s. In exactly the same period, the technique of intelligence testing also began to expand. Yet the relation between these two theoretical advances is often overlooked and misunderstood. This article focuses on the British context and considers why it is vital to consider the history of child psychoanalysis in relation to intelligence testing. The first half considers the growth of child psychoanalysis from the 1920s and reflects on how psychoanalytically informed thinkers such as Jean Piaget, Susan Isaacs and Donald Winnicott considered children's intellectual capacities in relation to emotional engagement. The second half considers major changes in approaches to mental health and ‘mental deficiency’ in the late 1950s, and explores how this led to a mounting criticism of psychoanalytic theories of ‘autistic’ and ‘psychotic’ thought. The article concludes with a reflection on how political change in the 1970s and 1980s influenced new models of child development and encouraged new psychoanalytic work.

Feminilidade e a sistematização kleiniana: o corpo materno como palco da gênese psíquica

Propomos investigar o tema da feminilidade presente no livro A psicanálise de crianças de Melanie Klein. Nossa concepção é a de que essa autora invertera a lógica clássica da constituição subjetiva do mundo ocidental: a de que o falo/masculino seria o ponto de partida para as diferenciações sexuais. A noção kleiniana de feminilidade que utilizaremos como lente para nossa leitura dessa obra nos permitiria, em termos epistemológicos, compreender melhor como se fundamentou a concepção dessa autora sobre o materno e a possibilidade de suas revisões sobre o complexo de Édipo e a proposição de novos conceitos. 
 

The Psychoanalysis of Children (Book Review)

The Psychoanalysis of Children (Book Review)

Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, the First Child Psychoanalyst: Legacy and Dilemmas

Despite being the first psychoanalyst of children, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth's history and writings remain relatively unknown. This paper endeavours to examine the way in which the history of the psychoanalysis of children is marked by the history of its protagonists. In particular, Hug-Hellmuth's treatment of children is divided between an educational approach and a more properly psychoanalytical aspect. Her theory and practice heavily influenced the directions taken after her, in particular by Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, even if this influence is essentially unacknowledged by these authors. Hug-Hellmuth's contribution to the psychoanalysis of children and consequently to child psychiatry are considerable and include technical innovation with the introduction of play into the treatment of children, the elaboration of the place of the analyst in regard to the child and notably the establishment of the place of the parents in regard to the treatment of the child. It is proposed that the very duality of her approach is what allowed her to be able to distinguish the place of the parent from that of the analyst. Nonetheless, her insistence on the place of education within the treatment and its effects on later theorists continue to raise dilemmas today.

Melanie Klein’s letters addressed to Marcelle Spira (1955–1960)

Between 1955 and 1960, Melanie Klein wrote some 45 hitherto unpublished letters to Marcelle Spira, the Swiss psychoanalyst living at that time in Geneva. In 2006, after Spira’s death, these letters were deposited with the Raymond de Saussure Psychoanalysis Centre in Geneva. They are the only known letters that Klein addressed to her psychoanalyst colleagues. Several topics are mentioned in them: (1) the meetings between the two women in Geneva and London; (2) Spira’s contribution to Boulanger’s translation into French of The Psychoanalysis of Children, which Klein herself carefully revised; (3) the papers that Klein was at that time working on, including Envy and Gratitude; (4) Spira’s own work; (5) the difficulties that Spira, a Kleinian psychoanalyst who trained in Buenos Aires, was encountering in her attempt to be admitted to the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society; and (6) a few items of personal and family news. In addition to the invaluable historical information that these letters provide, they offer us a very moving epistolary self‐portrait of Melanie Klein, enabling us to discover her personality in the final years of her life – she died in September 1960, just two months after writing her last letter to Spira.

Considerações históricas sobre a difusão do pensamento Kleiniano no Brasil

Este artigo tem por objetivo apresentar os diferentes momentos que caracterizaram a difusão do pensamento kleiniano nas Sociedades de Psicanálise do Brasil. Trata-se de uma pesquisa histórica de natureza qualitativa, realizada com base em entrevistas com 13 psicanalistas que participaram dessa difusão. As primeiras influências surgiram a partir de 1950, por intermédio de pioneiros que fizeram formação na Inglaterra ou na Argentina. As áreas em que os kleinianos foram pioneiros - psicanálise de crianças e análise de psicóticos - constituíram-se nos primeiros focos de utilização deste referencial no país. De 1950 a 1970, evidenciou-se uma apreensão dogmática das idéias kleinianas. A partir de 1980, com o advento de novas traduções da obra de Melanie Klein, e com a introdução do pensamento kleiniano contemporâneo, constata-se uma utilização mais equilibrada deste modelo teórico-técnico.

Radical Violence Inside Out: Woolf, Klein, and Interwar Politics

So Mrs Klein absolutely flourished here because for some reason terrain was very, very receptive. --Hanna Segal (200) The history of ideas is a dead study if it proceeds solely in terms of abstraction of influences. --Raymond Williams (71) In The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism, Lyndsey Stonebridge offers a critique of Elizabeth Abel's Virginia Woolf and Fictions of Psychoanalysis that brings into sharp relief important issues raised by recent return to Melanie Klein. (1) Stonebridge argues that Abel's study is flawed by its rather offhand idealization of Klein's idea of reparation, understood as a cultural sublimation of chaos and violence into art. This sort of idealization characterizes what Leo Bersani calls of redemption marked by a tendency to think of cultural symbolizations as essentially reparative (7). Following Bersani's critique of this tendency, Stonebridge writes: What is so upsetting about Klein's theorization of psychic life is her image of an aggressivity where is not always connoted as a benevolent concept of creativity; it can be much more cruel than Abel assumes (64). Against such a culture of redemption, we ought to read Melanie Klein for her insistence on a primal violence that even art and culture can sometimes express. Important to this argument is Stonebridge's critique of conventional idea of as a cultural prohibition and sublimation of violence. In its place, Stonebridge describes a superego which does not simply repress murderous desires but draws from them and repeats their ferocity with all violence that it at same time prohibits (7). Indeed, one crucial issue of original controversy surrounding Melanie Klein stemmed from her repeated contention that should be regarded as no less sadistic than id, whereas was generally assumed by orthodox Freudians as a cultural agency to repress or domesticate id. (2) Klein maintained that superego's severity is an outcome of destructive impulses of subject (Psycho-Analysis of Children [PC] 197) and that the becomes something which bites, devours, and cuts (Love, Guilt, and Reparation [LGR] 187). The unnerving implication of Klein's theory is that superego, far from being a cultural repression/sublimation of id, is a form of same primal sadism as id. The id/violence can be radical core of superego/ culture, an ominous example of Freud's paradox of uncanny: what seems most alien can be most familiar, and vice versa. In short, conventional opposition of culture vs. violence is deconstructed by Klein in a uniquely psychoanalytic way. Stonebridge elucidates decisive impact of First World War on Klein, British psychoanalysis, and several modernist writers, exploring their intertextual dialogues about the destructive element. Taking my cue from her, I will reconsider Woolf and Klein in context of another war--the after war (Hynes 353-82)--that is, severe class struggle in Britain in 1920s. (3) I will attend especially to political (a term of crucial importance in Kleinian theory) on part of (upper) middle-class intellectuals caused by [a]dmission of to 'liberal polity' (Lawrence 5), a sense of apprehension about the masses that made boundaries of body politic hard to define (Tratner 61).What makes Klein's theories, especially her concepts of phantasy (4) and projective identification, relevant to this anxiety is their primary concern with psychic inside and outside. Such theoretical preoccupations with psychic topography can be contextualized in (and regarded as a radical critique of) a contemporary middle-class urge to make a clear demarcation between itself and the masses. That is, there is a striking analogy between that operates in Kleinian psychic topography and that of interwar British middle-class body politic. …

Creativity and Transcendence in the Work of Marion Milner

Marion Milner was a British psychoanalyst whose life spanned the major part of the twentieth century. Unlike D.W. Winnicott, her contemporary and friend, Milner has yet to be discovered by scholars of religious studies. 1 Like Winnicott, her work lends itself well to the study of religious symbolism from the perspective of the early infant-mother relationship. In addition, Milner wrote extensively about the nature of creativity, and, to some degree, its relationship to transcendence. In this essay I investigate Milner's view of "creativity" as a vehicle for experiencing transcendence. In the course of exploration, I also address the role of unconscious processes in religious experience. To do so I look at a portion of the corpus of Milner's work in three parts: 1) her articles on Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, 2) Milner's last published diary, Eternity's Sunrise, and 3) her published account of work with a schizophrenic patient in The Hands of the Living God. These three foci, along with references to other works, provide a fairly accurate picture of Milner's understanding of the relationship between creativity, transcendence, and the unconscious. I) Milner's Interest in Creativity Marion Milner was born in London in 1900 as Marion Blackett, in a family of modest means. Since an excellent biography can be found elsewhere, 2 in tracing Milner's life trajectory I will limit myself primarily to discussing her intellectual interests and career pursuits. When she was seventeen, Milner left school and obtained a position teaching a young boy how to read. The position was extremely fortuitous, in that Milner's work with the boy sparked her interest in how [End Page 185] individuals discover the ability to concentrate. Milner later obtained a university degree in psychology and physiology at University College, London. Upon graduation she commenced a position in vocational guidance and mental testing for the Vocational Guidance Department of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. Two years later Milner began writing a diary exploring her own thinking processes, published in 1934 as A Life of One's Own (under the pseudonym Joanna Field). A second book, An Experiment in Leisure, was written while she was on leave from a project investigating the educational system of the Girls' Public Day School Trust. This book also examines the unconscious processes of her own mind. Milner's third book, The Human Problem in Schools (1938), resulted from the aforementioned school project. Upon returning to the school project, Milner entered into part-time psychoanalysis with Sylvia Payne. This choice of analyst put her "neither in the analytic stream led by Anna Freud nor in that led by Melanie Klein, for I did not even know that there was a deep controversy both in theory and practice between these two pioneers of the psychoanalysis of children" (Milner 1987b, 6). In 1939, the outbreak of the war put a moratorium on Milner's work in schools, and during this period she wrote her fourth book, On Not Being Able to Paint. This work is an extension of many of her earlier ideas, and it also explores the relationship between creativity and the analytic process. In 1940 Milner was accepted for training by the British Psycho-Analytic Society and subsequently began a new career as a psychoanalyst. In addition to her many psychoanalytic papers published in The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis (1987), Milner's book The Hands of the Living God (1969) makes a significant psychoanalytic contribution in its meticulous record of a lengthy analysis with a schizophrenic patient. Her final book, Eternity's Sunrise (1987), is an account of her personal spiritual journey and captures the main themes in her life experience as an artist, psychoanalyst, and spiritual pilgrim. Marion Milner died in 1998. Both Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott significantly influenced the direction of Milner's work (Dragstedt 1998, 442-450). [End Page 186] Klein, for...

Melanie Klein and Anna Freud: the discourse of the early dispute.

Divisions in the field of the psychoanalysis of children can be traced to a dispute over the infantile super-ego between the theorists Melanie Klein and Anna Freud beginning in 1927. These divisions are understood within the analytic world as the result of scientific disputation between alternative valid theories. An examination of the language, claims, and epistemology of Klein's and Freud's publications in 1927 that marked the public commencement of the conflict, reveals a personalized discourse in which authority was derived from the allegiance, experience, and personal analytic standing of the contestants as much as from theoretical insight. The structure and rhetoric of the debate suggest that, rather than terminating the dispute, the publications of 1927 served to encourage professionalization in child analysis and establish Anna Freud and Melanie Klein as authoritative alternative theorists.

Notes toward a Marxist Critical Practice

Notes toward a Marxist Critical Practice Jerry Phillips (bio) and Ian Wojcik-Andrews (bio) The critical essays written for volume 18 of Children's Literature employ various psychoanalytic master narratives derived from Freud, Jung, Klein, Chodorow, and Kristeva that govern both current psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism of children's literature. Some of these theorists challenge and revise Freud's findings: feminist critics, for example, use psychoanalytic models to emphasize pre-oedipal relationships rather than oedipal confrontations as the prime mover of narrative structures. Even so, volume 18 remains curiously unconcerned with the problematic nature of the relationship between the psychoanalytic enterprise and the interpretation of children's literature. We suggest that this relationship can really be addressed only by opening a dialogue within the text between the historical condition of its production and the moment of its reception. To the extent that children's literature itself investigates the efficacy of adult values, psychoanalysis in its commitment to questioning moral conventions finds within children's literature a natural discursive ally. Psychoanalysis can tell us something about the way language embodies such forces as displacement and condensation to direct generic conventions, but it barely informs us about the historical forces that determine these conventions. Psychoanalysis is part of, but not the whole, truth. As a theory of utterance, psychoanalysis turns the literary text into a neat version of itself: the story of desire is always already in place. Whether through the notion of the "inner quest" or the notion of the alluring mother's body, psychoanalysis elides the particular context of the literary work—its inscription of its historical moment—in favor of a "universal" narrative. Yet it does not follow that the oedipal model of development or the pre-oedipal pattern of desire is a universal cultural phenomenon. In one sense, psychoanalytic and Marxist forms of criticism have similar trajectories: archaeological metaphors of uncovering and unraveling dominate [End Page 127] both their practices. Psychoanalysis works to reclaim the reality of the unconscious as it affects the textual representation of language and desire. Marxism works to reclaim the reality of the text's "political unconscious" (Jameson 1981)—that is, the gaps, fissures, and ruptures that provoke and articulate the class conflict and economic struggle that the dominant ideology of the text, its hegemonic levels of meaning, would otherwise silence. Both psychoanalysis and Marxism work toward a theory of genre. "Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact" (Jameson 106). Even so, the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism remains problematic. Psychoanalysis is committed to universal truths of nature, whereas Marxism locates the concept of nature within the social and the political, where all meaning is ultimately produced, including that of psychoanalysis. A radical critical practice of children's literature should return psychoanalytic models to their familial and social ground: the historical and material conditions that produce children and children's literature. Children's literature arises as a discursive practice from a distinct cultural context. For instance, Jack Zipes writes of the fairy tale: "Almost all critics who have studied the emergence of the literary fairy tale in Europe agree that educated writers purposely appropriated the oral folk tale and converted it into a type of literary discourse about mores, values, and manners so that children would become civilized according to the social code of that time" (Zipes 3). Books like Robinson Crusoe , Tom Brown's Schooldays , Swallows and Amazons became classics only after being ratified by the middle classes and their literary gatekeepers—publishers, librarians, and critics. The classic is not just born; it is that locus of invested value which the text for whatever reason becomes. Concerned as it is with edification and entertainment, children's literature is a logical site for the production and circulation of social ideals. Hence its frequently Utopian character. We must recall that a child—the subject of the text and its implied reader—is also determined by the ideology of the literary marketplace. A child reader does not pre-exist; he or she arrives with and is created by the text. The position of the implied...

Review of The psycho-analysis of children and Narrative of a child analysis: The conduct of the psychoanalysis of children as seen in the treatment of a ten year old boy.

Review of The psycho-analysis of children and Narrative of a child analysis: The conduct of the psychoanalysis of children as seen in the treatment of a ten year old boy.

Modern Psychoanalysis: New Directions and Perspectives

Modern Psychoanalys is is a definitive exploration of the expanding horizons of this still controversial approach to and treatment of human behavior. In the first paperback release of a work sponsored by the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, thirty-five authorities explore new approaches to psychoanalytic theory and therapy, and examine the growing interaction between this field and the other social and behavioral sciences. Modern demonstrates how some of the leading figures are bringing their discipline into the mainstream of biological and social through!--making use of systems theory, information processing, the constructs of adaptation and learning, and other new tools and findings. book is unusually free of the jargon that has separated psychoanalysis in the past from the rest of behavioral and social science. Some of the authors and their subjects are: Roy Grinker, Conceptual Progress in Analysis; Jin-gen Ruesch, Psychoanalysis between Two Cultures; Edward Tauber, Dreaming and Modern Dream Theory; Jules Masserman, The Biody-namic Roots of Psychoanalysis; Lewis H. Wolberg, Short-term Psychotherapy; Stuart M. Finch and Albert Cain, Psychoanalysis of Children; Morris Parloff, Analytic Group Psychotherapy; Salvador Minuchin, The Low Socioeconomic Population; Leonard Duhl and Robert Leopold, Psychoanalysis and Social Agencies; Leo'n Edel, Psychoanalysis and the Creative Arts; Arnold A. Rogow, Psychiatry, History and Political Science; and John R. Seeley, Psychiatry: Revolution, Reform and Reaction. volume is prepared with the rigor and comprehensiveness that should make the book a standard handbook for psychiatrists, psychologists, and behavioral scientists. And it is written with a sense of curious readers who may simply be interested in the basic stances of this controversial field of theory and practice. It has earned sufficient plaudits to be called a classic in the field. Judd Manner's new introduction gives added weight to such claims.

Group Psychoanalytic work with Children

In a group context, the spontaneous play of young children expresses symbolically their free associations and their fantasies just as verbal productions of older children and adults treated in groups. The described technique allows us to treat latency and pre-school neurotic children, through the analysis of their collective play, according to the principles of Melanie Klein for the individual psychoanalysis of children. The trials we had with different groups in therapies lasting for more than a year, has convinced us that it is possible to interpret and work through the children's productions in group as in individual psychotherapy. The technique can be modified for young psychotic patients and constitutes an excellent method of observation and treatment. The method can be further modified to include parents in group observation of children and families for diagnostic purposes. This paper deals with methodology. We endeavoured to show that our method of group therapy was applicable to the different age groups and to the different psychiatric entities of adolescence and childhood. We purposely abstained from mentioning the evolution of these patients, since any percentage of improvement would be meaningless in such small series. However, we may add that some hopeless patients did not improve at all, but that many patients did show a remarkable improvement.

A comparison of the techniques employed in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis of children.

A comparison of the techniques employed in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis of children.

Book Review: The Psychoanalysis of Children

Book Review: The Psychoanalysis of Children

Review of The psycho-analysis of children.

Review of The psycho-analysis of children.