In a groundbreaking integration of the work of Lacan, Winnicott, and Tustin, Catherine Mathelin reveals how a child's symptoms can be a striking reflection of its parents' unresolved conflicts. She shows how her patients' art, much of it reproduced here, can communicate both initial anguish and progress in treatment, and draws on her experience of working on a neonatal unit to argue compellingly that a child's mental health can be endangered even before birth. "This is a book hard to put down, filled with the most fascinating brief case vignettes of parents and children who live in worlds disconnected from each other, hoping for experts to heal their suffering." -Anni Bergman, coauthor of The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant
Lacan did not say or write very much about the psychoanalysis of children. There is no doctrine of the psychoanalysis of children in his work. Instead, his 1956-1957 seminar on 'the object relation' and his 'Note on the Child' of 1969 have been adopted by Lacanian analysts working with children as providing essential coordinates for direction in their clinical work. This book is the result of inviting psychoanalysts of the Lacanian orientation working with children around the globe to theorise and conceptualise that work. The Lacanian psychoanalyst works with the notion of the subject as a 'speaking being', but the child subject brings particular exigencies to the psychoanalytic work. Contributors attend to these exigencies in their essays by articulating the precise particularities of the direction of the treatment and psychoanalytic work with children.
Drawing together an international range of psychoanalytic practitioners, this collection provides a critique of mainstream models of autism, looking at the conceptual and ideological underpinnings of the behavioural and cognitive approaches popular today. The first book to provide a psychoanalytic unpacking of standard non-analytic approaches, it offers a series of critical essays on mainstream assumptions, examining their history, foundations, and validity from a variety of angles. The authors consider, from the Lacanian perspective, the hypothesis of the biological-genetic causality of autism, as well as the claims of these approaches to offer effective therapy. These discussions are historically contextualised by an introduction and afterword that also provide pointers and references to further reading on Lacanian approaches to autism. Illustrated throughout by clinical examples, Treating Autism Today will be of interest to Lacanian clinicians and scholars, as well as psychotherapists, psychologists, and those working with children diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum.
Emotions are the common ground of child psychotherapy and a therapist's essential means of communication with children. Improved emotional resilience must be the shared therapeutic goal of all those who work with children and families.In Emotions in Child Psychotherapy, Kenneth Barish presents an integrative framework for child therapy, based on a contemporary understanding of the child's emotional experience. Barish begins with a concise review of recent advances in the psychology and neuroscience of emotions and an analysis of several emotions-interest, shame and pride, anxiety, anger, and sadness-that are essential, but often underappreciated, in therapeutic work with children. Offering an emotion-based perspective on optimal and pathological development in childhood, Barish argues that in pathological development, negative emotions have become malignant and children are locked in vicious cycles of interaction that perpetuate defiance and withdrawal. Based on these principles, Barish presents a comprehensive model for therapeutic work with children and families. He demonstrates how a systematic focus on the child's emotions provides new understandings of all phases of the therapeutic process and effective means of solving persistent clinical problems: how to engage more children in treatment, mitigate the child's resistance, and provide the kind of understanding to children that promotes openness, initiative, and pro-social character development. Finally, Barish offers a set of active therapeutic strategies that will help repair family relationships damaged by frequent anger and resentment, as well as specific techniques to help parents resolve many of the most common challenges of childrearing.Emotions in Child Psychotherapy includes extensive clinical illustrations and addresses many of the problems faced, at some time, by every child therapist. Both richly informative and highly practical, this book will be value to all students of child therapy and to practicing clinicians of differing theoretical orientations.
'Fuelled by agitation and panic about paedophilia, child abuse, violence and neglect on the one side, and by children as violent murderers and killers on the other, there has been an explosion of concern regarding the place, care, treatment and life of Children, in Europe and beyond. This broad-ranging and provocative collection of papers, a volume in the Winnicott Studies Monograph Series, focuses on all factors pertaining to the child and childhood, including the role that psychoanalysis has to play. The book offers a unique and fascinating understanding of developmental issues from early infancy through latency and into adolescence from various psychoanalytic approaches. The papers, written by experts in the field examine closely all aspects of this fascinating subject from Freud to Winnnicott; from neo-natal care to adolescence. The contributors take into account issues such as fostering and adoption, vital scrutiny of the role of the family, and presentation of children in the media while all the time asking the salient question, "What is a child?"
This collection of articles is a sociolinguistic response to the recent explosion of scholarly interest in issues of identity. Identity is central to all human beings as we are all concerned with how to conceive of ourselves, present ourselves and comprehend our relationships with others. The book tackles the problem of how personal identity is made visible and intelligible to others through language, and how this may be constrained. Part One, Emblematic identities, focuses on the construction of self-definitions based on various forms of group identities, including national and ethnic ones. Part Two, Multicultural Identities, looks at negotiation of identities in multicultural contexts involving relations of power, drawing on examples from Europe and the Americas. Finally, Part Three, Emergent Identities, collects empirical studies based on a close reading of texts in which identities are being articulated and negotiated.
In the English-speaking psychoanalytic world, few diagnostic categories are as controversial as hysteria. This concept, widely held to reflect outmoded cultural prejudices aganist women, has virtually disappeared from our theoretical literature, diagnostic manuals, and traning programs. However far from being gender-bound, hysteria from Jacques Lacan represents a psychic strategy that bears on one of the most fundamental preoccupations of existence: What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man?
This concise study offers a clear and informed reassessment of Lacan's ideas and how they revolutionized psychoanalysis. Specialists and newcomers alike will appreciate this examination of a complex figure who was by turns a master, a charlatan and a surrealist artist.
This companion text to Introduction the Reading of Lacan focuses on the concept of the psychic structures of desire. Using case examples, Dor explains the crucial difference between symptomsówhich can be phenomenologically graspedóand the actual psychic structure of the subjectówhich can be revealed only through the discourse of the patient in the psychoanalytic situation. This work brings life and practicality to a psychoanalytic movement that has been misperceived and divorced from the daily vicissitudes of analytic work.
Designed for novices as well as students of psychology and literary criticism, these systematic lectures do much to clarify Lacan's groundbreaking work on the birth of the subject and its links with Freud's theory of drives. Moreover, they answer some of the criticisms that have been leveled at Lacan by forms of psychoanalysis unable or unwilling to incorporate his ideas.
