With the push toward accountability and test performance in schools there has been a decline in emphasis on creativity, imagination, and feelings in schools. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools is designed for students and professionals who are interested in restoring such values to their work with children. There is an absence of psychoanalytic ways of thinking in conventional professional discourses of schooling. With a few notable exceptions, the discourses of child development, classroom management, early childhood education, special education, school psychology, and school counseling have constructed notions of children and schooling that are often behaviorist, instrumental, and symptom-focused. Curriculum too often focuses on acquisition of knowledge and behaviors; discipline is conceptualized as compliance, and symptoms such as anger, school resistance, etc., are pathologized and reacted to out of context; children’s special needs are often conceptualized instrumentally; and children with complex psychological symptoms are delimited, depersonalized, or simply removed. Professionals who work with children psychodynamically draw on diverse frameworks including the work of Anna Freud, the long tradition of the Tavistock Clinic in London [e.g., Anne Alvarez, Susan Reid, Margaret Rustin, Frances Tustin, etc.], the writings of Klein, Winnicott, and their colleagues, French analysts [e.g., Piera Aulagnier, Didier Anzieu, Laurent Danon-Boileau, Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, and Catherine Mathelin] and Italian infant/child analyst Alessandro Piontelli. This work is valuable but often inaccessible to school professionals because the writing is somewhat specialized, and because there is no tradition of teaching such work in professional preparation in those fields. This collection is theoretically grounded in that the authors share a commitment to valuing children’s emotions and understand the usefulness of psychoanalytic approaches for enhancing children’s lives. It is laden with examples to invite into this discussion those students and professionals who value these ideas but for whom this book may be their first introduction to progressive educational ideals and psychodynamic ways of working with children. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools provides an introductory volume to open the door to the possibility of introducing psychodynamic frameworks to education and human service professors and school professionals and professionals working with children.

For school professionals seeking to work in emotionally focused ways with children, this book offers a wide range of essays illustrating how psychodynamic ideas can be used to validate children, respect the contexts of their families and communities, and create non-authoritari...

The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education presents various theories of play and demonstrates how it serves communicative, developmental, and relational functions, highlighting the importance and development of the capacity to play in terms useful to early childhood educators. The book explicitly links trauma, development, and interventions in the early childhood classroom specifically for teachers of young children, offering accessible information that can help teachers better understand the meanings of children’s expressive acts. Contributors from education, psychoanalysis, and developmental psychology explore techniques of play, how cultural influences affect how children play, the effect of trauma on play, factors that interfere with the ability to play, and how to apply these ideas in the classroom. They also discuss the relevance of ideas about playfulness for teachers and other professionals. The Imprtance of Play in Early Childhood Education will be of great interest to teachers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists as well as play therapists and developmental psychologists.

Current educational policies, particularly in the United States, have swung so far in the direction of overtly politicized and decontextualized testing, that we are losing opportunities to support the imaginative and expressive capacities of a generation of children and adolescents with implications for our individual and collective health. Enter arts education and the healing arts as urgently needed remedies for this imbalance, to swing the pendulum of educational practices back to a place of balance and wholeness. Informed by an arts-based sensibility, this book explores how imaginative, creative, and artistic experiences can heal, and why we urgently need them at the heart of our educational discourses and practices. These chapters invite teachers, teacher educators, and therapeutic professionals to reclaim imaginative, arts-based experiences as central to the human conditions that they serve. The narratives and case studies included here are of interest for any arts-based qualitative research course as an example of narrative inquiry, and in arts and general education programs for their pedagogical implications. “As Blake invited us to find the world in a grain of sand and showed us how poetry could materialize this, so too these storytellers discover and shape their personal meanings in ceramic pots, paintings, poems, drama, and poetry. While the stories told here are deeply ingrained interior journeys, all reflect ways of observing and embracing the world of others, of becoming wise, becoming self, and becoming skilled practitioners of meaning making. By naming and framing they suggest that clarity becomes possible and personal freedom achieved.” – Judith M. Burton, Teachers College, Columbia (from the Foreword) “This anthology offers a substantial number of narratives that represent seeking wholeness, sustenance, and renewal. In many cases, the authors provide a tribute to those who have impacted their lives in profound ways. This is an important contribution to both art education and literary education in the world of scholarly research.” – Laurel H. Campbell, Purdue University

An accessible text for practitioners, students, and non-specialists about the practice of psychotherapy in South Africa. Psychoanalysis as a long term modality is inaccessible to the average South African. In this book the authors describe how psychoanalytically orientated or psychodynamic psychotherapy can be practiced as a short-term endeavour and applied to contemporary issues facing the country. Psychodynamic work is currently undertaken by clinical psychologists, therapists, clinicians, trainers, teachers, clinical supervisors, consultants and researchers working in university settings, state hospitals, community projects, private practice and research. The debates, clinical issues, therapeutic practice and nature of research covered in the book are widely representative of the work being done in the country. The need for shorter term therapy models and evidence-based interventions is as acute in global practice as it is locally. The lessons learned in South Africa have broader implications for international practitioners, and the authors stress the potential inherent in psychoanalytic theory and technique to tackle the complex problems faced in all places and settings characterised by increasing globalisation and dislocation. The book is structured in three main sections. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in South Africa is aimed at local and international practitioners and students, while non-specialist readers will find the text informative and accessible.

Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering: Trauma, History, and Memory offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives that highlight the problem of traumatic memory. Because trauma fragments memory, storytelling is impeded by what is unknowable and what is unspeakable. Each of the contributors tackles the problem of narrativizing memory that is constructed from fragments that have been passed along the generations. When trauma is cultural as well as personal, it becomes even more invisible, as each generation’s attempts at coping push the pain further below the surface. Consequently, that pain becomes increasingly ineffable, haunting succeeding generations. In each story the contributors offer, there emerges the theme of difference, a difference that turns back on itself and makes an accusation. Themes of knowing and unknowing show the terrible toll that trauma takes when there is no one with whom the trauma can be acknowledged and worked through. In the face of utter lack of recognition, what might be known together becomes hidden. Our failure to speak to these unaspirated truths becomes a betrayal of self and also of others. In the case of intergenerational and cultural trauma, we betray not only our ancestors but also the future generations to come. In the face of unacknowledged trauma, this book reveals that we are confronted with the perennial choice of speaking or becoming complicit in our silence.

We are the first generation in recent history to not know if our children will have a better life than us. Over the past thirty years, the dream of upward mobility and stable and securely paid employment has dissipated. This collection draws together insights from the disciplines of cultural studies, literary theory, psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, social policy and sociology, in order to explore the complex and contested status of “the family” under neoliberalism. At one end of the spectrum, the intensification of work and the normalisation of long-hours working culture have undermined the time and energy available for private family life. At the other end, the fantasy of the nuclear family as a potential “haven in a heartless world” is rapidly unravelling, supplanted with a hypercompetitive, neo-traditionalist, mobile, neoliberal family seeking to capitalise on the uneven spread of resources in order to maximise the futures of its own children. As neoliberalism has always been split between socio-economic realities and the expectations of where we “should” be, we are always living with the anxiety of being left behind and the hope that the best is yet to come. The chapters in this collection signal the troubles of the neoliberal family: in particular, the gulf between the practical conditions of family life and the formation of new fantasies. The volume addresses the neoliberal family in a range of contexts: from the domestic, reproductive and bio-political regulation of family life, the representations of the neoliberal family on television and across social media, to the negotiation of family dynamics in maternal memoirs. The work provides a much-needed corrective to the critical emphasis on the macrostructures of the neoliberal world.

Transgenerational Trauma and the Aboriginal Preschool Child: Healing through Intervention approaches trauma from transgenerational perspectives that go back to the early colonization of Australia, and describes what that event has historically meant for the country’s Aboriginal population and its culture. This history has continued to propagate traumatically across subsequent generations. This book reveals the work underway at Gunawirra, a group in Sydney founded to work against transgenerational trauma in families with children aged 0–5. The group then began working with projects in more than forty country preschools throughout the state of New South Wales. Two intrinsic forms of healing that are an integral part of this ancient culture: Dadirri (deep listening), and The Dreaming, are foundational concepts for the treatment. While these concepts are core elements of the project, this book also employs fresh contemporary theory and case studies that present ways to effectively address the deeper psychological origins and presence of trauma in our present-day preschool children, and in traumatized children throughout the world. It gives special attention to the use of therapeutic measures based in psychoanalytic thought and related modes of responding to trauma. Through many moving examples the book unites—through art, stories of The Dreaming, and the ancient gift of listening—a powerful way of approaching present-day work with Aboriginal people and their children. The contributors’ work is at the forefront of field research, clinical work, and theoretical interdisciplinary work. This book is essential to workers and teachers who deal daily with traumatized children in their communities and schools. In the usefulness of its model, the depth of its thinking, and the intensity of its methodology, Transgenerational Trauma and the Aboriginal Preschool Child breaks new ground in the treatment of trauma for people who care for children everywhere.

Adaption and Psychotherapy gives a concentrated but complete picture of Robert Langs’s adaptive clinical theory, and also expands Langs’s treatment of adaptation by examining Carl Jung’s theory of adaptation. This book articulates Jung’s positive and clinical understanding of adaptation in a way that allows comparison to Langs’s adaptive paradigm as well as a creative synthesis of the two approaches. The result is a development of Langs’s adaptive paradigm and an expansion of clinical theory and technique that is valuable for both Freudian and Jungian analysts.

Trauma was a potent influence in the lives of pre-1924 Eastern European Jewish immigrants. They uprooted themselves because of grinding poverty, anti-Semitic discrimination, pogroms, and the violence of World War I. This book’s psychoanalytically-informed life stories, based on 22 in-depth interviews with the immigrants’ adult children, tell the tales of these immigrants and their children. Many of the children believed their parents had left their lives in Eastern Europe behind them. This disavowal—aided by the immigrants’ silence and denial—allowed their children to minimize the trauma and loss their parents suffered both before and after immigrating. I analyze the impact of parental trauma and loss on the second generation. Trauma and loss affected the transmission of memory, and, consequently, often immigrants’ recollections were not passed on to future generations. The topics of trauma and loss in the lives of Eastern European immigrants are relevant in understanding current immigrants to America. Often immigrants’ children tried to repay the debt that they felt was incurred by their parents’ sacrifices. Resilience, accomplishment, and their transition from their immigrant parents’ world to their own full participation in the American milieu characterized the adult lives of the immigrants’ children.