Do Children Get Better When We Interpret Their Defenses Against Painful Feelings?

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Notes

In a personal communication, Paul Gray (2000) wrote, “As I suspect you anticipated I’m very pleased by your ‘Exclusion of Child Psychoanalysis’ contribution [Hoffman, 2000]. You are quite right about this neglect. Your drawing attention to a ‘virtual exclusion’ of child analysis in my writings prompts me to reexamine my own position. As a non-child psychoanalyst I’ve consciously resisted publishing my ideas about this area. In my various activities with a series of child analysts I try to engage their minds toward a greater sense of inclusion. My explicit, and consistent gratitude toward Anna Freud has allowed me to experience a degree of ‘inclusion’ of adult and child work that probably is not apparent except to those analysts with both adult and child training with whom I regularly exchange ideas … . as I look in detail at my own papers I am impressed with your noting my ‘virtual exclusion’. Although I found that I ‘exclude’ it from my references, I firmly espouse the idea[s] in Anna Freud’s ‘Normality and Pathology in Childhood’ … which recognizes what I feel is the important reference to transferences that derive from attachments to authority that are not primarily for purposes of gratification, but are for defense. As you know I regard this as a central issue that is emphasized in close process attention for purposes of conflict and defense analysis.”.

Bornstein was part of the original group of child analysts who worked with Anna Freud (1945, page 7) in the 1920s.

During a discussion, Betram Ruttenberg reported that during supervision with Bornstein, when a supervisee would say what he thought during a session, she would say, “No, but what did you feel?”.

At the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in collaboration with the Derner Institute in Psychology of Adelphi University, we have begun a Systematic Evaluation of 5 Decades of Treatment Notes from The New York Psychoanalytic Treatment Center of adult patients utilizing automated measures as developed by Wilma Bucci and Bernard Maskit (2005) and comparing them to clinical evaluations. This paragraph and the following one (in text, above) are excerpted from a detailed description of the project (Wilma Bucci and Leon Hoffman, Co-Principal Investigators).

In order to study narratives of detailed case reports of children and adolescents (including detailed case reports written for the literature), we will utilize a variety of automated language measures as developed by Wilma Bucci and Bernard Maskit. The language measures will enable us to identify nodal points in the treatment (e.g., points of valuable analytic work, points of potential disruptions in the treatment, interventions by the analyst to repair potential disruptions, points in the treatment where repair was not accomplished, etc.). Detailed process notes around such nodal points will be examined with the automated measures. In addition, clinical evaluation of the material around the nodal points will be examined by experienced analysts blind to the study hypotheses in order to compare clinical evaluation with the conclusions of the automated measures. In future work, the process of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis will be compared using these measures.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leon Hoffman

Training and Supervising Analyst and Director, Pacella Parent Child Center, The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.