Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools

With the push toward accountability and test performance in schools there has been a decline in emphasis on creativity, imagination, and feelings in schools. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools is designed for students and professionals who are interested in restoring such values to their work with children. There is an absence of psychoanalytic ways of thinking in conventional professional discourses of schooling. With a few notable exceptions, the discourses of child development, classroom management, early childhood education, special education, school psychology, and school counseling have constructed notions of children and schooling that are often behaviorist, instrumental, and symptom-focused. Curriculum too often focuses on acquisition of knowledge and behaviors; discipline is conceptualized as compliance, and symptoms such as anger, school resistance, etc., are pathologized and reacted to out of context; children's special needs are often conceptualized instrumentally; and children with complex psychological symptoms are delimited, depersonalized, or simply removed. Professionals who work with children psychodynamically draw on diverse frameworks including the work of Anna Freud, the long tradition of the Tavistock Clinic in London [e.g., Anne Alvarez, Susan Reid, Margaret Rustin, Frances Tustin, etc.], the writings of Klein, Winnicott, and their colleagues, French analysts [e.g., Piera Aulagnier, Didier Anzieu, Laurent Danon-Boileau, Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, and Catherine Mathelin] and Italian infant/child analyst Alessandro Piontelli. This work is valuable but often inaccessible to school professionals because the writing is somewhat specialized, and because there is no tradition of teaching such work in professional preparation in those fields. This collection is theoretically grounded in that the authors share a commitment to valuing children's emotions and understand the usefulness of psychoanalytic approaches for enhancing children's lives. It is laden with examples to invite into this discussion those students and professionals who value these ideas but for whom this book may be their first introduction to progressive educational ideals and psychodynamic ways of working with children. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools provides an introductory volume to open the door to the possibility of introducing psychodynamic frameworks to education and human service professors and school professionals and professionals working with children.
About the Author: Ana Archangelo is an associate professor at the Faculty of Education at UNICAMP (University of Campinas--Brazil) where she teaches undergraduate and post-graduate courses and supervises Master and PhD degrees. Her research interests focus on Social Exclusion, Psychoanalysis and Education. She has investigated children who have shown what she has coined as "the capacity not to learn" for the last ten years. Derek Bunyard is currently the Route Manager for the Early Childhood Pathway in Education Studies at the University of Winchester, U. K., having previously held various management positions in the university within a number of disciplines. His involvement with education has covered both the Arts and Sciences, while his specialist research area is centered on the philosophy of representation. His interest in psychoanalysis is wide-ranging, and in relation to early childhood studies this has been particularly influenced by the work of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. Carrie Catapano, LCSW, has over 14 years experience providing psychodynamic psychotherapy to children and parents on a broad range of issues. Carrie serves as the Head of School and Clinical Director at West End Day School. Specifically at West End Day, Carrie and her staff of teachers and social workers, employ psychodynamic principles to help students tap into the emotions that are at the root of their distress. Carola B. Chase, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in New York City, working with children, adolescents, and adults. She is a member of The Contemporary Freudian Society, where she received her psychoanalytic training. Jonathan Cohen is an educator-clinician. He has worked with K-12 students, educators and parents since 1974 as a middle school special educator, school and clinical psychologist, practicing child and adult psychoanalyst, professional development facilitator and school climate improvement leader/learner. Howard H. Covitz, PhD, ABPP, NCPsyA, is a later middle-aged psychoanalyst engaged in the private psychoanalytic treatment of personality disorders. He came to this role via a twisting and winding road that wound its way in and out of biblical studies, theoretical mathematics, teaching and educational administration. He has taught high school, undergraduate and graduate courses in diverse areas, including: Biblical Characterology, Theoretical Mathematics, Clinical Psychology and Statistics. Daniel B. Frank, PhD, is the Principal of the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, and Executive Editor of Schools: Studies in Education, an international education journal published by the University of Chicago Press that is dedicated to understanding the subjective experience of school life. Dan is a member of the School Liaison Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is the recent past-Executive Director of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. Al Galves is a licensed psychologist in Colorado. He is the Executive Director of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry and a member of the Board of Directors of MindFreedom International. He is the author of Harness Your Dark Side (New Horizon Press). Leon Hoffman, MD, has been a psychiatrist for four decades and a psychoanalyst for three decades. He is a Board Certified Adult, Adolescent and Child Psychiatrist as well as Certified in Adult, Adolescent, and Child Psychoanalysis by the American Psychoanalytic Association. Patrick Lewis is a storyteller-teacher-researcher working with children, undergraduate, and graduate students in Early Childhood & Elementary Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. Karen L. Lombardi is Professor at the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, Adelphi University, Garden City, New York, and on the faculty of the Northwest Center for Psychoanalysis, Portland, Oregon, as well as on the faculty of the Postgraduate Programs for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at Adelphi University. Robbie Lloyd is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Youth Health & Wellbeing at the Menzies School of Health Research, Darwin. Robbie has been working in and out of education for 40 years focusing on child-centred learning and whole-school-cultures of wellbeing, and he has also combined community development and journalism with that focus on empowering local development, plus acceptance of difference as a gift among all humans. Karen Lupe is a qualified counsellor and psychotherapist- a graduate of the Psychosynthesis Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Auckland, New Zealand. She has published several papers on the subjects of psychology, culture and collective trauma. These include: "An Ocean with Many Shores: Indigenous Consciousness and the Thinking Heart" published in "Penina Uliuli: Contemporary Challenges for Pacific Peoples." Edited by Culbertson, Agee, and Makasiale 2007. "Being Afakasi" Co-author- ibid. "Standing on the Threshold" published in "Su'esu'e Manogi- In Search of Fragrance" by Tui'atua Tupua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi et al (editors) 2008. Katy Meyer, MS Ed., has worked in the educational field for more than fourteen years. She currently serves as the Education Head at West End Day School (WEDS), a school for children with special needs, where she supervises the educational program and develops curriculum. Before joining the WEDS staff, Katy worked in a private school, first as a classroom teacher for seven years and then as a learning specialist for four years. Michael O'Loughlin, PhD, is a professor at Adelphi University, New York, is on the faculty of Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies and in the School of Education. He is a clinical and research supervisor in the Ph.D. program in Clinical Psychology and on the faculty of the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy at Adelphi. He published The Subject of Childhood in 2009 and edited Imagining Children Otherwise: Theoretical and Critical Perspectives on Childhood Subjectivity with Richard Johnson in 2010. collaboration with Marilyn Charles. Devin Thornburg is a professor of education at Adelphi University, specializing in learning and development of diverse populations and school reform. His doctorate in counseling psychology led to several years of clinical work and psychoanalytic training with children after he was a classroom teacher and before he was a university professor. His publications have spanned almost three decades, representing his scholarly and professional interests in work with children from culturally and linguistically diverse populations, their families and their teachers. Norma Tracey is a member of the Australian Association of Social Work (MAASW) and has been a member of the New South Wales Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (NSWIPP) for many years. Apart from her private practice of 25 years she has worked especially with Aboriginal mothers and infants for the last ten years. She is the author of two books, several booklets, and some 30 nationally and internationally published papers. Fabio Camargo Bandeira Villela is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at UNESP, Presidente Prudent campus. His Master degree is in Education at PUC-SP and his PhD will be in Education (Psychology of Education) at UNICAMP and has done research in Psychoanalysis, as well as in Psychoanalysis and Education. He has developed projects involving playful activities for children with learning disabilities attributed to emotional factors and has written articles about Psychoanalysis and the classroom. Donna Wolf-Palacio, LCSW, MFA, is a psychoanalyst and family therapist in Philadelphia. She is the Training and Education Coordinator for Hall Mercer Community Mental Health Center of Pennsylvania Hospital/UPHS/. She received her psychoanalytic training as a Fellow at the Postgraduate Center Institute in New York. She also has an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and has taught a poetry workshop at the University of the Arts.