Thirty years of abdominal pain

In this paper, the author describes a brief psychotherapy with a man who has struggled with abdominal symptoms for most of his adult life. After an unhappy childhood, the patient (Mr A) married and then was witness to the birth of his stillborn child, in a foreign country. Soon after his abdominal symptoms started, and plagued him for the following 30 years. In the therapy, Mr A began to explore areas of guilt, hostility, and shame, together with previously unknown-about unconscious phantasies. By the end of the therapy, he reported a substantial diminution in his symptoms, as well as changes to his relationships, and mode of thinking and feeling. Some aspects of working psychoanalytically with patients with somatic symptoms, especially those pertaining to the gastrointestinal tract, are discussed.     

Highs and Lows in Motor Control Development

Abstract

Motor control is classically described as relying on two components: anticipatory control (feedforward processing) and online control (feedback processing). Here we aimed to unveil the developmental steps of both feedback and feedforward control in 5–10 years old children, using a simple and ecological task. We manipulated object’s weight in a reach-to-displace paradigm. When the weight was known before lifting it, anticipatory processes were quantifiable during the reaching phase. Conversely, an unknown weight triggered online corrections during the displacing phase. Movement kinematics revealed that children anticipate this objet property as young as 5 y-o. This anticipation becomes adequate around 7 y-o and is paralleled by poor online corrections. This simple yet relevant paradigm should allow quantifying deviations from neurotypical patterns in disorders of motor control.     

Psychoanalytic thinking in primary care: The Tavistock Psychotherapy Consultation model

This paper describes the conceptual underpinnings, structure and operations of a novel service, the City and Hackney Primary Care Psychotherapy Consultation Service – a service set up partly with the aim of addressing the needs of patients who present with ‘medically unexplained symptoms’. As part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, this service moves its clinical base, staff members and daily work, as well as the foundations of psychoanalytic thinking that define the Trust's work, into the heart of a community, and provides psychoanalytically informed clinical practice and consultation to patients and general practitioners in the City and Hackney, one of London's (and the UK's) most deprived and ethnically diverse boroughs. The authors describe the psychoanalytical underpinnings of the model, the design and structure of the service, patient demographics and preliminary outcome data, as well as an example of consultation work with general practitioners. The authors propose that psychoanalytic applications have a place in primary care and that psychoanalytic thinking can help general practitioners and patients alike, even when the clinical interventions offered are not solely based on psychoanalytic technique or therapeutic approaches. The paper concludes with thoughts about the model, its origins and its future.     

Early Caregiver–Child Interaction and Children’s Development: Lessons from the St. Petersburg-USA Orphanage Intervention Research Project

Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review - We review a series of interrelated studies on the development of children residing in institutions (i.e., orphanages) in the Russian Federation or...