Parent Work in the Development and Teaching of Child Analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper traces a line from the early psychoanalytic pioneers working as parents, to those whose approach seemed to be to work on parents, to those who explored working via the parents, and concludes with the contemporary practice of working with parents as partners in child analysis. The inclusion of parenthood and parent work in didactic training, supervision, and analysis during and after training is elaborated.

KEYWORDS:

• Work with parents
• child analytic training
• history of child analysis
• life span psychoanalysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. When he later murdered Hug-Hellmuth in a robbery attempt, some critics blamed the evils of applying psychoanalysis to children (Geissmann and Geissmann 1998, 47).

2. Brown (1986) and Rustin (1999) describe training in parent work in a Jungian institute and at the Tavistock Clinic respectively. The groundbreaking contributions from the study of attachment, parent-infant psychotherapy, and mentalization on understanding parenthood must be acknowledged but are beyond the scope of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Denia Barrett

Denia Barrett is a child and adolescent supervising analyst trained at the Hanna Perkins Center in Cleveland, Ohio. She is a faculty member of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and is a teacher and supervisor for a number of other institutes. She has a private practice in Chicago, Illinois.