Early Childhood/Pre-Oedipal to Oedipal

Child Psychoanalytic Training (CPT)
2021-22, 1st Trimester — Fridays, 10:15-11:45am
Julie Wood, MA

View Whole Syllabus

Introduction

This year of the Child Psychoanalytic Training program focuses on early childhood, historically referred to in the psychoanalytic world as pre-oedipal, oedipal, and pre-latency. We’ll be learning how to treat children and their families from birth to about 5 years old. Both fall and winter trimesters will be didactic with clinical material, and the spring trimester will be the continuous case conference with all child CA’s at SPSI.

Additional Readings:

• Melandri, F. (2017). Milk and Tears: A Very Difficult Beginning: The Assessment and Treatment of a Young Boy with Atypical Presentation. J. Infant Child Adolesc. Psychother., 16(2):158-174
  Illustration of Anna Freud’s developmental profile, with contemporary developmental assessment.
• Hilke, I. (2007) Miss “Nicht”: A Small Girl Who Was Betrayed of Her Childhood. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 2:195-207
  3 year old girl, 2 year treatment
• Gotthold, J. J. (2007) “Do You Believe in Magic?” Articulating a Coconstructed Dynamic Systems Approach to a Child Treatment:: A Discussion of Hilke’s “Miss Nicht”. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 2:209-217
• Donner, S. L. (2021) Making Meaning through Play: Psychoanalytic Intervention in a Pre-School Child with Global Developmental Delay. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 74:209-226
• Slade, A. (2006). Reflective Parenting Programs: Theory and Development. Psychoanal. Inq., 26(4):640-657
• Slade, A. (2008). The Move from Categories to Process: Attachment Phenomena and Clinical Evaluation. Att: New Dir. in Psychother. Relat. Psychoanal., 2(1):89-105
• Slade, A. (2009). Mentalizing the Unmentalizable: Parenting Children on the Spectrum. J. Infant Child Adolesc. Psychother., 8(1):7-21
• Cutner, N. (2014). The Impact of Insecure Attachment on Mothering: A New Mother’s Story. J. Infant Child Adolesc. Psychother., 13(1):37-50
• Markese, S. (2011). Dyadic Trauma in Infancy and Early Childhood: Review of the Literature. J. Infant Child Adolesc. Psychother., 10(2):341-378

Learning Objectives

Students will:

1. be able to assess, identify, and conceptualize problems in early childhood, including parenting concerns, and parent-child relational difficulties.
2. demonstrate emerging skills for working with parents with infants and toddlers, including facilitating healthy attachment and responding to problems of normal development.
3. demonstrate play therapy skills for working with preschoolers and young children, including interpretation and working within play metaphors.

October 1, 2021 — Introduction to working in early childhood

[71 pages]

Gilmore, K. and Meersand, P. (2015) Ch. 2, “Infancy: Psychoanalytic Theory, Developmental Research, and the Mother-Child Dyad in the First Year of Life” in The Little Book of Child and Adolescent Development, pp29-50.

Gilmore, K. and Meersand, P. (2015) Ch. 3, “Toddlerhood: Separation-Individuation, Rapprochement, and the Forerunners of Superego Development” in The Little Book of Child and Adolescent Development, pp51-70.

Gilmore, K. and Meersand, P. (2015) Ch. 4, “The Oedipal Phase and the Oedipal Complex: Developmental Advances and Theoretical Considerations” in The Little Book of Child and Adolescent Development, pp71-100.