The Congruence of International Children's Rights and Feminist Principles as a Foundation for Therapy with Young People

SUMMARY

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty that supports and protects humans under age eighteen, embodies several principles that are useful in guiding mental health treatment with young people. Here we summarize relevant tenets of the Convention and offer an analysis regarding its relevance to feminist therapy. Topics covered include participation and limited self-determination, privacy and autonomy, supportive community, access to information and care, least restrictive environment, and access to protection and recovery assistance. We then deconstruct the apparent assumptions underlying the Convention through a feminist, post-modern, social constructionist perspective. We conclude that the Convention offers a useful vision for work with children and is consistent in some ways with feminist-informed practice, although attention must be given to factors about which the Convention is silent, including gender, privilege, and assumptions regarding family, child, mental health, and human development.     

The archive and psychoanalysis: Memories and histories toward futures

Abstract

The archive and psychoanalysis are reconnected in a new framework. The archaeological metaphor of psychoanalysis, the traditional view of archives as storehouses of historical items, and the notion of memory as storage are revised according to the conceptions of fluid and dynamic archival and memory systems. A combination of psychoanalytic models and cognitive memory research is proposed to form developmental archival theory that will take into account the changing contexts of memory, meaning-making, negotiation of interpretation, and knowledge regulation. The three phases of registration (archivalization, archivization, and archiving) are seen in the dynamics of unconsciousness–consciousness, and in relation to the archivists’ and researchers’ transferences to their records as self-objects, transitional objects or evocative objects. Becoming conscious of archives is a continuous journeying through the multiple registrations and narrativizations of archives in the interaction between non-declarative and declarative memory. The archive and psychoanalysis touch upon processes that are suggested to concern metamemory and metareflection (the interplay between meta-emotion and metacognition). The futures of archives and psychoanalysis call for context-sensitive remembering and being attentive to the co-constructive translations of personal and social memory. Opening archives and psychoanalysis toward the unprecedented, without closing histories and memories, is the interminable task of encountering the “missing moment.”     

Historiography and psychoanalysis

Abstract

The act of writing the history of psychoanalysis poses crucial questions with regard to the openness of society. This article examines the fundamental issues faced by researchers when they set about writing the history of psychoanalysis in a specific country. The significance of reconstructing features of the psychoanalytical practice is discussed. The opposition that exists between the current academic ideals and those of the psychoanalytic societies is outlined with reference to the changes that society has undergone, particularly during the past 30 years. In this context, the stance maintained by psychoanalysts with regard to psychiatry, academic psychology, and the university education of psychotherapists is defined. Government accreditation processes for psychologists and psychotherapists are likewise illustrated in the light of the opinions held by psychoanalysts at different moments in time.     

Body and meaning

Abstract

This paper discusses the very important but disregarded theme of somatization. Somatizers comprise a wide-ranging group of patients, who normally choose to consult doctors rather than psychoanalysts for treatment. We present two clinical reports of somatizing patients in which the psychoanalyst played a considerable role in the study and treatment of their problems. The subjects were not only totally relieved of their physical symptoms, but also dramatically changed their psychic lives.     

The critique of Eros: Freud on narcissism and the prospects for romantic love

This paper examines the prospects for real/actual love as viewed from a classical psychoanalytic framework. It is argued that Freud’s prescient and controversial 1914 work On Narcissism: An Introduction holds great importance for an understanding of his views on love, which in many ways were never explicitly defined. After the concepts of narcissism and love are considered, the aim, process, consequences and specific choices of object love are analysed. Perhaps not surprisingly, both narcissism and the residue of infantile love objects permeate and continually influence subsequent object love in a powerful manner. These perseverations of the infantile, along with impediments arising from the beloved, society and the self, create a number of difficulties for a would-be lover. Despite these hindrances from both within and without, real/actual love is certainly possible within Freud’s framework, but it is hard won and appears to require the dispelling of illusions, emancipation through recognition of one’s determinism, acceptance, introspection and continual character development.     

The role of a parent's illness in the emotional experience of a child evidence from Klein's Narrative of a child analysis

Abstract

The analysis of Richard, described by Melanie Klein in Narrative of a Child Analysis, gives us some insight into the effect on a child of threats to the health of his parents. His mother was involved in a road accident when Richard was 2; his father collapsed during the time of the analysis when he was 10. This paper links these events with disturbances in Richard's relation to his father and to his mother, as well as with threats to his own integrity, as demonstrated in the analysis. Richard's reversal of roles with his father and mother is discussed, as are Klein's reaction to Richard's report of finding his father ‘ill and nearly fainting’ and Richard's response to her behaviour. The paper draws attention to the way in which a child's reaction to the ill health of one parent can affect relations with both parents, as well as disturbing his sense of himself.     

A Review of “The Relational Origins of Prejudice: A Convergence of Psychoanalytic and Social Cognitive Perspectives”

Abstract

Key concepts in social welfare and clinical social work - concepts such as person-in-environment, women's rights, prevention and outreach-had as precedents the pioneering theory and practice of Europe's free psychoanalytic clinics of the 1920s. Sex-Pol, a Viennese community-based clinical network created in 1927 by Wilhelm Reich, perhaps the most overtly political of the first psychoanalysts, was motivated by reformist social goals he shared with Sigmund Freud. This historical study of Sex-Pol draws on Reich's own words to explore his use of the term “social work” where clinical work is predicated on an activist ideology of human liberation.     

Discovering the Inner Life of a Child

Abstract

Using Winnicott's concept of transitional space, joint attention, theory of mind, and a case vignette, the author describes techniques in elucidating and elaborating a child's play space, hence, psychic life. Explicating the child's theory of mind uncovers the dynamics, motives, conflicts, and unconscious material used by the analyst to form interpretations and encourage the child's self-reflective function (Fonagy & Target, 1996). Finally, a case vignette illustrates the enhancement of play space by elucidating the child's theory of mind.     

Ferenczi's “Confusion of Tongues” Theory and the Analysis of the Incest Trauma

Abstract

The tender-mother transference of Ferenczi's humanistic analytic orientation was as important an advance in pioneering times as was Kohut's selfobject transference in contemporary psychoanalysis. Ferenczi's clinical theory and method began a focus on pre-oedipal experiences, which eventually became an alternate to the oedipal theory. Freud was critical of Ferenczi's formulation, leading a successful attempt to suppress his work and remove it from mainstream psychoanalysis because he believed it was “regressive.” In actuality, Ferenczi's “Confusion of Tongues” theory and “Relaxation Therapy” were prophetic and pioneering attempts to understand and treat the incest trauma (ironically the clinical data upon which Freud founded psychoanalysis 100 years ago). In the case of Miss T., Ferenczi's ideas are applied to the contemporary analysis of the incest trauma.     

Anna Freud's contribution to the psychoanalytic theory of development

This paper elaborates key areas of Anna Freud's theory of development, setting these in the context of Freud's structural model and its influence on her early work. The centrality of the role of the ego and the beginnings of one of her major achievements, the elaboration of a psychoanalytic developmental psychology, are shown in evidence in 1936, in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. The author develops this theme in an exploration of the 1965 work Normality and Pathology in Childhood, looking from the base of normal development, via defence and conflict, to regression and significant developmental factors.