Development I: Birth to 5 Years

Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2020-21, 1st Trimester — Fridays, 1:45-3:15pm
Judy K. Eekhoff, PhD
Kelly Lippman, LMHC

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Introduction

Welcome to our course on Child Development (Birth to age 5). This course is the didactic complement to the Year Two Infant Observation course and we expect to refer to last year’s rich array of observations to illustrate and deepen our understanding of the concepts we will explore this trimester.

Sigmund Freud’s curiosity and theorizing about how childhood was linked to suffering and joy in adulthood led to the idea of developmental progression and therapeutic intervention. Early child psychoanalysis, developed by Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, and based in nuanced observation and clinical work, focused attention on the internal dynamics of infants and young children as well as the importance of their relational and social contexts. These foundational theorists set the stage for decades of observational research and psychoanalytic exploration, all of which has led to our contemporary understanding of attachment, developmental progression, affect regulation, object relations, identity formation, projective processes and neurobiology.

During this class, we will examine this topic from a variety of vantage points with the goal of providing a nuanced and multilayered contemporary understanding of child development rooted in a historical psychoanalytic context.  Throughout the course, we will apply our learning to the adult clinical situation.

Learning Objectives

This class will offer clinical associates a broad understanding of child development in the first five years of life. At the end of this course, associates will be able to:

1. Assess the developmental experiences of their patients from a variety of perspectives and recognize how patterns of early experience dynamically affect the adult clinical situation.
2. Apply their knowledge of internal working models of attachment, affect regulation and object relations in order to listen more sensitively and respond and interpret more accurately to patients, which will enhance treatment persistence and outcomes.
3. Recognize the effects of early relational trauma, better empathize with unbearable affect and receive and metabolize projective communication more effectively in order to facilitate improvement in patients’ reflective capacity, self-cohesion and affect regulation.
4. Develop an understanding of the process of building representations in an internal world in order to better formulate patients’ material and improve treatment efficacy.
5. Recognize relationships between projections, objects and introjects in patients’ internal worlds in order to listen and analyze relationships that generate meaning between internal objects and between the internal and external world.

September 11, 2020 — Origins of the Self

[25 pages]

In this session, we will begin to explore the question of how we become who we are.  We will consider the internal and external conditions that contribute to development of the infant and young child’s mind/body/self experience. The external family is the matrix for the child’s development. The child’s contribution to their development is the manner in which experience of the family is processed. 

Winnicott, D.W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 41:585-595.

Stern, D. (1985) Chapter 6, “The Sense of a Subjective Self: I. Overview”, in The Interpersonal World of the Infant, pp124-137

Optional Reading

Klein, M. (1958). On the Development of Mental Functioning. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 39:84-90.

Winnicott, D.W. (1949) “Mind in its Relation to the Psyche-Soma”, in D.W. Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis, pp243-254

Fonagy, P. and Target, M. (2007). The Rooting of the Mind in the Body: New Links between Attachment Theory and Psychoanalytic Thought. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 55(2):411-456