Emotions as practice: Anna Freud's child psychoanalysis and thinking–doing children's emotional geographies

The paper introduces Anna Freud's early writing from the perspective of the theory and practice of children's emotional geographies. Discussing especially Freud's view on the theory of defence mechanisms and her early arguments with Melanie Klein about the nature of the child's mind, it explores how children's emotions can be approached beyond children's own representational accounts of their emotional experiences. The paper advocates an engagement with Anna Freud's work and psychoanalysis that would account for different forms of knowledge produced in the intersubjective processes of research and for the significance of the relationships with child participants.     

Ghostbusting Transgenerational Processes

Transgenerational processes contribute to organizing and disorganizing attachment. The past (in all its forms and potentialities) lives on in the present, influencing the affective field of the parent–child intersubjective matrix. In a child's construction of self, he or she may run up against the confounding presence of ghosts: the dissociated, and thereby unreflected upon past of their parents. This implicitly felt, yet explicitly unknown transmission interferes in the processing of emergent experience and impedes the child's development.

Attachment theory, informed by psychoanalysis, and nonlinear dynamic systems theory, is the main theoretical underpinning of this paper's examination of the mechanisms involved in the transfer of dissociated dynamics from parent to child. The child's symptoms grow out of an incoherent affective field that defies representational mapping into a flexible usable theory of mind. Through play a child therapist finds openings to enter the attachment system, reflecting on how a child's experience is being felt, yet unthought about by both child and parents. A parent's recognition process, thereby making what was implicitly felt explicit and consequently more coherent, supports the child in his or her efforts to reorganize aspects of the attachment relationship. Both clinical experience and quotations from literary works are woven into this paper in an attempt to convey the texture, emotional depth, and universality of the subject under discussion.     

“Why Won't My Parents Help Me?”: Therapeutic Assessment of a Child and Her Family

We present a case study of a child's psychological assessment using the methods of Therapeutic Assessment (TA). The case illustrates how TA can help assessors understand the process and structure of a family by highlighting how maladaptive family processes and interactions impact a child's development. It also illustrates how TA with a child can serve as a family intervention. In this case, it became apparent that the child's social difficulties were significant, not minor as initially reported by the parents, and were rooted in an insecure attachment, underlying depression, an idiosyncratic view of the world, and longing for attention, all of which were hidden or expressed in grandiose, expansive, and off-putting behaviors. In addition, the familial hierarchy was inverted; the parents felt ineffective and the child felt too powerful, leading to enhanced anxiety for the child. Intervention throughout, punctuated by the family session and feedback sessions, allowed the parents to develop a new “story” about their child and for the child to experience a new sense of safety. Following the TA, the parents and child indicated high satisfaction, enhanced family functioning, and decreased child symptomatology. Subsequent family therapy sessions allowed the family to further implement the interventions introduced in the TA.     

Book review of Joining and leaving religion: research perspectives Leslie J. Francis and Yaacov J. Katz (Eds) Leominster,Herefordshire, Gracewing, 2000, 336 pp. £20.00 ( pb) ISBN 0 85244 517 2

Children and young people have the capacity to conjure feelings of faith and hope when experiencing emotional and psychological distress. World myths, legends and fairy stories as part of early child development offer a rich source of material to draw from and enlist in the therapeutic endeavour. Fairies often act in a healing capacity in mythology, or they appear as agents between the world of human affairs and the invisible forces of nature. Mythological beings also possess helping powers in advance of mortals achieving superhuman tasks, but they can also when used as metaphor, frighten children and potentially cause psychological harm. This paper suggests that mental health practitioners can utilise such powerful narratives therapeutically and in a culturally respectful and spiritually innovative way. Harnessing the child's imagination can be a powerful vehicle for a transforming experience at the psychic level with consequent positive benefits for emotional well-being.     

Mindful Parenting: a group approach to enhancing reflective capacity in parents and infants

In this paper, the process of ending therapy is likened to the ordinary developmental task of ‘letting go’ that parents have to undertake, to help their child to grow up. ‘Letting go’ is contrasted with the process of ‘holding’ the child in mind that is so central to the therapeutic and parental task Following thoughts about some of the external issues that play a part in the decision to end a child's treatment, this developmental perspective of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is discussed through a clinical illustration of the ending of a 5-year-old boy's treatment. Different strands of the therapeutic relationship as highlighted during the ending phase of therapy are distinguished and attention is drawn to the role of the ‘new relationship’ between therapist and child and how this differs from the transference relationship. Countertransference issues in their broadest form are also considered.     

Upset in response to a child's partner's infidelities

The weight of existing evidence suggests that men display greater upset in response to a long‐term partner's sexual infidelity, whereas women display greater upset in response to a partner's emotional infidelity. This sex difference was first hypothesized by evolutionary psychologists, who argued that the difference may reflect sex‐differentiated evolved psychological design. Some socialization theorists, in contrast, have argued that the difference may be attributable to sex‐differentiated socialization practices. A. Fenigstein and R. Peltz ( 2002 ) collected data from parents of undergraduates about upset in response to a child's partner's infidelities and found that both sexes report greater upset in response to a son's partner's sexual infidelity and in response to a daughter's partner's emotional infidelity. The key variable therefore is the sex of the child, as predicted from a heuristic application of an evolutionary perspective, and not the sex of the parent, as predicted from a heuristic application of one socialization perspective. We report a replication of these findings using data collected from retirees with an average age of about 70 years who have at least one son and one daughter and most of whom have grandchildren. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Maternal Psychological Absence and Toddlers' Social‐Emotional Development: Interpretations From the Perspective of Boundary Ambiguity Theory

The current study tests a novel latent construct reflecting psychological absence and examines its relations with maternal depression, mother–toddler interactions, and toddlers' social‐emotional outcomes in a low‐income sample (N = 2,632). Structural equation modeling confirmed a psychological absence construct and revealed that psychological absence, measured at the child's 36‐month birthday‐related assessment, is a significant predictor of children's social‐emotional development at 36 months, mediated by mother–child interaction. Results are interpreted within a boundary ambiguity framework.     

A psychotherapeutic technique for mother-child intervention: A case study of a japanese down syndrome child

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate our approach to the activation of mother-child interaction, by presenting a case study. We describe a Japanese mother's adaptation process (consisting of five stages) to her child's handicap through 6 years of continuous therapeutic support for both the mother and her child. In this particular case, the mother suffers from a mild form of cerebral palsy; therefore, the problem involves two generations, because both the mother and her child are handicapped. By analyzing the processes of this case, we also describe our method of intervention for problems in the development of multidimensional relationships. We discuss the mother's psychological maturation and the role of the therapist within the Japanese social and cultural context, under the following headings: (1) Sharing in the Mother's Ambivalence; (2) Natural Melting of the Mother's Frozen Emotional Availability; (3) Sharing in the Mother's Illusion and Disillusion; (4) Transformation of Relationships Between Family Members and Their Relationship to Society.     

Reading between the lines: The child's fear of meaning

This paper explores the emotional factors that lie behind a child's failure to read. My observations are based on work as an educational therapist employed in a child guidance unit. In trying to understand the reasons for the child's neurotic reluctance to learn, the following sources have proved helpful: Klein on envy; Bowlby on the effect on the child of a relationship with an untrustworthy adult; and Bettelheim's Learning to Read. In conclusion some ways are examined in which the child can be helped to overcome his fear of the meaning of words.     

‘Who owns my pain?’ An aspect of the complexity of working with looked after children

This paper underlines the difficulties of working with looked after children and their carers. The author discusses a particular approach to respond to the complexity of looked after children's emotional difficulties, and their impact on the network of professionals making decisions about their life in care. As their own parents are no longer in a position to take responsibility for them, their trauma and past abuse make for a lack of clarity amongst this network when establishing the responsible role in loco parentis. In order to provide effective therapeutic work with these children, it is crucial to consider their disturbance as affecting the network around them. Enabling the network to understand and process powerful feelings around the child enhances its self-reflective function, so crucial for thinking about the child's needs and emotional development.     

Narrative Child Family Therapy

In this article, child family therapy is presented as a hermeneutic activity shaped by an interest in the evolving narrative. Over brief, analytic play interviews, the therapist documents a child's narrative understanding of the presenting family problem. This allows psychological meaning to be jointly constructed in therapeutic conversation with the child and family. The idea of play as narrative integrates child psychotherapy into recent social constructionist thinking in family therapy. The article also discusses how narrative therapists can use prior theory and training.     

Role adjustment as the unit of analysis for researching child development during the transition to school

While child development is well-recognized as a complex process which could hardly be decomposed into separate lines or domains in contemporary psychological theories, the decomposition approach is widely used in empirical studies. Based on the cultural-historical theory, this study argues for adopting the unit of analysis as a way to bridge this gap, and finds “role adjustment” as a suitable unit to analyse child development during the transition to school. The case of a 5-year-old second-generation Chinese Australian child's transition to school (with a total of 34 h of observation and 5 h of interview) is presented to verify its feasibility and to illustrate how it could be achieved in a research practice. The case study demonstrates that a child's role adjustment is in essence a process of transforming his/her role system, during which his/her major roles, the relation of the major roles, as well as his/her role-taking patterns change as a whole, and by tracing a child's role adjustment trajectory, how the child is learning and developing, what difficulties he/she encounter, and why these difficulties appear become clear.     

Loss as a lifelong regenerative learning process

The predisposition to internalize death and loss of crucial attachment objects, subjectively, as a physical attack on the body, is commonly acknowledged in the field of human psychological behaviour (Freud 1915; Parkes 1972). This view is held, essentially, according to psychoanalytic principles of the functioning of the mental processes, to advance the concept of mind and body sensations as psychical consequences, or affects , of loss trauma. It does not, nevertheless, preclude wider social and cultural factors from adding to our understanding of how and why we react to loss in deeply individual ways. In the affective domain of human experience, the relationship between emotional pain and learning may not strike an immediate connection, since emotions are assumed to be subjective psychological affects of the psyche, while learning involves cognitive processes associated with developed responses to external stimuli. From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, it is possible to conceptualize the interconnecting of mind and body ‘states’ associated with pain, through the channelling and regulation of psychic tension in the ego. Importantly, the channelling of impulses into mind and body ‘ideas’ suggests a dynamic process capable of activating the human potential for emotional development and learning through the ego's capacity for adaptation to external change. We can speak, therefore, of affective learning as an integrated regenerative counterpart to emotional devel When death and major life changes are followed by corresponding feelings of loss, the human propensity to search for, and the lost object is generally viewed by therapists to be a normal part of grieving, however paradoxical the demands for integrating thoughts and irrational actions might feel. This illustrates the of a grief process that ultimately demands a degree of emotional development in enabling us to tolerate high levels of anxiety, there is disparity between the inner world of feeling and external reality. In psychodynamic grief work, the therapeutic principle of through' the deeper, inner layers of loss and mourning creates one such model for developing emotional learning and insight. It within this framework that the client can begin to understand his irrational motives, and be freed from the related feelings of alienation in his inner world.

The aim of this paper is to examine the concept of loss and learning in a wider context to include lifelong processes of and growth, which may be a cause for grief. It raises the significance of personal meaning(s) we attach to loss, links this theme to the aetiology of separation anxiety, loss and mourning from a psychoanalytic perspective.     

Child's behaviour in mother–child interaction predicts later emotional and behavioural problems

The aims were to examine the association of maternal or child interactive behaviour with emotional and behavioural problems of the child simultaneously and 3 years later, and to assess whether there is continuity in children's emotional and behavioural symptoms from 2 to 5 years. Sixty‐five 2‐year‐old children with their mothers were videotaped during a feeding situation. Their mothers completed the CBCL at 2 years and when the children were 5. Simultaneously, there were no strong correlations between child's emotional and behavioural problems and maternal or child interactive behaviour. Subsequently, mothers' higher sensitivity and more optimal structuring, as well as child's higher involvement of the mother, were associated with lower levels of child externalizing and total problem scores. Also, less responsive children showed more externalizing symptoms 3 years later. There was continuity of emotional and behavioural problems from 2 to 5 years. Problems in mother–child interaction may predict behavioural problems in the child subsequently. Besides maternal behaviour, it is important to consider the interactive behaviour of the child. Children who are less responsive and who show less involvement of the mother are more likely to subsequently present more externalizing symptoms, and these children should be recognized and treated early. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aggregation and amplification of marginal deviations in the social construction of personality and maladjustment

Some social maladjustment in children is understood from a new perspective focusing on the cyclical interaction between personality variables and social psychological processes in the development of risk mechanisms. A profile of originally marginal deviations between a child and peers on selected behavioural tasks and personality functioning is a risk indicator of eventual significant perturbations in social adjustment. The aggregation of reciprocal effects between the child's behaviour and the reactions of teachers and peers becomes amplified over time into increasingly greater deviations and more negative reactions. Our multi-causal model centres the ‘at-risk’ child within a complex psycho-social system and identifies a series of processes that influence behaviour along this path of transformation from marginal to significant social deviation. Empirical support for aspects of this model is emerging from a long-term, longitudinal study with Italian school children.     

The Cocreation of Fantasy and the Transformation of Psychic Structure

This author argues that therapeutic action in child psychoanalytic psychotherapy rests with the creation and transformation of fantasy through play, which in turn shifts psychic structure. The paper details the treatment of an eight-year-old girl whose mother's inability to playfully participate in the inner world of her child interfered with the child's development of a fantasy life. The author suggests that the introduction of objective reality (i.e., interpretations that link the child's play with the real world) potentially impinges on and interferes with the transformational processes of fantasy. Developing the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy does not take place through a forced accommodation to reality, but rather through the expansion of fantasy and a widening of the realm of the imagination. The elaboration of fantasy in concert with a parent or analyst is what builds the child's capacity to differentiate reality from fantasy.     

Parent–Adolescent Conflict,Negative Emotion,and Estrangement From the Family of Origin

Adolescence is a developmental period in which parents and children renegotiate roles in light of the children's blossoming individuality and autonomy on one hand and parent–child emotional connectedness on the other hand. The renegotiation process often involves difficulties in communication, which generate tension and conflict and also amplify emotional intensity. In this study, I examined sociocontextual differences between families who maintain contact during the child's young adulthood and those who "repair" the relationship only through separation or detachment. Three waves of panel data I utilized for this investigation reveal that emotional closeness to a parent during adolescence and a rewarding romantic relationship and religiosity during young adulthood play protective roles in maintaining the parent–child relationship beyond adolescence. A parent's alcohol use, high levels of parent–adolescent conflict, family economic hardship during adolescence, and delinquent behavior and depressive symptoms in the adolescent increase the risks for termination of the parent–child relationship. The findings provide evidence for the long-term impact of parent–child conflict and negative emotion during adolescence.     

The role of fathers in children's emotion regulation development: A systematic review

This systematic review summarizes the results of 43 studies that explored the potential role of fathers in emotion regulation (ER) development in children. Following a tripartite model, this review investigates the paternal modelling of ER strategies, emotion-related paternal parenting practices, father–child emotional climate, and fathers' characteristics, by identifying 16 specific themes of paternal factors that could play a role in the child's ER development. Results show that while a large number of studies investigated father–child emotional climate and fathers' characteristics and their association with children's ER, the effects of paternal modelling and the father's emotion-related parenting practices on children's ER are still understudied. This review reveals that several factors—fathers' modelling of ER strategies; positive reactions and support in responding to their child's expression of emotions; better quality of the father–child relationship; higher father–child attachment security; and positive parenting in terms of sensitivity, engagement, and expressiveness—had significant associations with children's higher ER skills. Conversely, fathers' psychopathology and harsh parenting were associated with poorer ER skills in children.

Highlights

• This study summarized existing literature that explored the association between paternal factors and ER in children.
• The review showed some evidence supporting the paternal role in children's ER development.
• Fathers' role in the development of child's ER is most prominent in infancy and toddlerhood.
• Most paternal factors significantly associated with a child's ER reflected previous findings examining maternal factors.

     

Factors associated with parent labeling of children referred for conduct problems

Clinicians have suggested that in some cases normal children have been inappropriately labeled as deviant by their parents and taken to psychological clinics for treatment. Reasons given for such inappropriate labeling have included factors such as the parents' marital distress and intolerance of normal child behavior. This study provided an empirical examination of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of parent labeling of 5–12-year-old children referred by their parents for treatment of conduct problems. The definition of inappropriate labeling derived by the present investigators required that the relationship between the child's actual behavior and the parent's negative label be so imperfect as to raise questions about the justification for the label, and that some identifiable factors other than the child's behavior account for the negative label. Three parent factors evaluated for their contribution to the parent negative label were marital distress, parent negative behavior toward the child, and parent distress about child deviant behavior. The statistical model of hierarchical multiple regression permitted analysis of this definition. The association found between observed child deviant behavior and the parent negative label suggested that parents of this sample perceived their children reasonably accurately. The three parent factors were found to be negligibly related to the parent label. Therefore, the conditions for inappropriate labeling of the children by the parents of this sample were not met.     

The clinical utility of Piagetian-based scales of infant development

The clinical utility of assessment scales based on Jean Piaget's theory of infant development is described. A clinical process is presented which permits one to determine (a) whether a child is showing delayed or non-delayed sensorimotor performance, (b) whether a child is showing normal or atypical patterns of sensorimotor development, (c) the extent to which deviations in a child's patterns of development are present, (d) the exact nature of such deviations, if any, and (e) what types of interventions are most appropriate for enhancing a child's acquisition of sensorimotor competencies. Four examples of the application of the clinical process are presented.