Some thoughts on the “new” latency age: Normality and psychopathology

Abstract

The author discusses some aspects of the impact of our changing society on the latency phase, while presenting a clinical case. At this age, children need a reliable environment, protecting them from sexual and aggressive overstimulation, as an essential condition for the work of latency to be carried out. As some authors point out, if post-Oedipal repression is hindered, children may be pushed towards an early, highly disruptive adolescence process. Strong and untimely anxieties may arise, requiring particular defensive and adaptive strategies. According to the author’s experience, concerns about death may be observed, these not usually being expected at the latency age. In some children, these seem to promote an early process of intellectualization. The patient described here was a violent, self-harming child from a disturbed family. As soon as his psychic state improved with psychotherapy, he expressed anxiety about mortality as a general human condition and was able to reason on the concept of infinity at a quite abstract level. The significance of this observation is discussed from a developmental point of view.

Key words:

• social changes
• latency age
• intellectualization
• death anxiety

Notes

1 I would like to thank one of the referees for their objection related to the influence of new technologies on childhood, which I consider as a highly relevant theme. This, however, was not an issue for my patient, who was rather exposed to unfiltered TV: like most Italian children in primary school who live outside big towns, he had no access to the Internet, and in our sessions, he never mentioned video-gaming.

2 In the second period of latency (Bornstein, 1951), children can understand the concept of mathematical infinity for discrete objects, such as natural numbers, as a result of an iterative process (Lakoff & Nuñez, 2000): this is what Filippo does when he says: “a new one … and then a new one … endlessly.” But then he is taking two more steps: he is thinking on infinity in the continuous (a smooth path) and, more remarkably, he is intuitively understanding the possibility of setting an infinite path on a closed surface.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paola Morra

Paola Morra is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in private practice with children, adolescents and adults, particularly with patients suffering from eating disorders. She is a lecturer at the Istituto PSIBA for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy in Milan, Italy.