Life Span Development I

2-Year Certificate Program (2YCP)
2022-23, 2nd Term — Mondays, 6:30-7:45pm
Kelly Lippman, LMHC

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Introduction

As children move from infancy to middle childhood, multiple intersecting aspects of development and self-organization occur, all within a social and cultural context and sometimes disrupted by trauma. Infants and young children experience transformation in object relating, accommodation to reality (and associated mourning), capacity for ambivalence and greater affect tolerance (love, hate, rivalry), capacity for imaginary play and symbolic thought, mentalization (theory of mind), identification with aspects of caregivers and others in their family and cultural surround, nascent gender and racial/ethnic identity and the formation and consolidation of the superego and ego ideal. The implications of this early period of development truly reverberate throughout the lifespan.

We will explore early and contemporary ideas as well as papers that focus on clinical vignettes. As we go, I hope that we will hold in mind Tummala-Narra’s thoughts about decolonization and how theory arises in a context and can be deployed to deepen or obscure our understanding of human subjectivity.

Although we will be talking about early child development, we will be applying what we learn to adult treatment. I welcome your feedback on the course and the readings as we proceed.

Learning Objectives

1. Assess the developmental experiences of their clients from a variety of perspectives and recognize how patterns of early experience dynamically affect the adult clinical situation.
2. 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 reflective capacity, self-cohesion and affect regulation.
3. Develop an understanding of the process of building representations in an internal world in order to better formulate clinical material and improve treatment efficacy.

November 14, 2022 — The Relational Matrix of Infancy and Attachment

[35 pages]

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

Sroufe, L.A. (2017) Ch1, “Attachment Theory: A Humanistic Approach for Research and Practice Across Cultures” in Attachment Across Clinical and Cultural Perspectives: A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach, New York: NY. Routledge. pp1-24.