Middle Childhood and Beyond: Evolving Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Developmental Tasks and Clinical Work, Post Classical Theoretical Contributions, Neurobiology, and Our Changing Culture

The four articles in this section¹ represent reflections by prominent psychoanalysts on the critical developmental tasks of middle childhood and beyond, whose mastery is essential to healthy adaptions and personality growth at later stages of development as well. Three contributors reconsider the meaning and tasks of the period termed “latency” in light of evolving post classical theoretical contributions, understanding of affect development, neurobiology and significant cultural considerations. Our fourth article contributes a novel framework rooted in affect theory and evolutionary anthropology which is useful in understanding and working with affective instability. Each article presents implications for the developmentally facilitating aspects of the psychoanalytic work, with considerations beyond models which privilege interpretation of unconscious conflict.

Beginning with Anne Alvarez’s classic article (2023), “Development toward the latency period: Splitting and the need to forget in borderline children, originally published in 1989 Volume 15 of Journal of Child Psychotherapy,” we travel with Dr Alvarez as she considers the evolution of her thinking about middle childhood tasks, classical perspectives, and engages us in an exploration and reconsideration of our very understanding of middle childhood (aka latency). She addresses the developmental tasks of that period and changes in the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic process needed to facilitate maturation in seriously disturbed children. Graham Music (2023), considers the changing nature of the clinical difficulties he sees in recent and current practice with children who are in middle childhood. He explores the important neurobiological changes of middle childhood as well as current cultural shifts which impact and inform the title of his article “Latency? If only: Rethinking middle childhood, its developmental tasks, neurobiology, cultural differences and how trauma and neglect undermines its course.” Barish (2023) once again introduces us to the work of Jaak Panksepp (1998), the renowned neurobiologist who coined the term “Affective neuroscience.” As he has done in previous work on adolescence (Barish, 2020) he explores in experience near and easily accessible terms, his integration of Panksepp’s contributions, the power of affects and his own (Barish) therapeutic integration of these ideas in his work with children and parents.

Our final article in this small section is by Kellman and Radwan (2023), who introduce us to a new framework for considering the role of affect theory in understanding and treating patients with early developmental psychopathology. Presenting their framework, developed from clinical work, neuroscience, and evolutionary anthropology, they provide a useful addition to our clinical perspective when working with patients with early developmental psychopathology. They argue that conceptualizing a line of affective development starting with basic, primary affects, and progressing to nuanced, contextualized, tertiary affects helps locate the origin of the affective instability and dysregulation of some patients.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Each of these authors presented other versions of their work, in their contribution to a Conference entitled “Reclaiming Middle Childhood: A Neuropsychoanalytic Lens on Working Through Emotional Pain Towards Resilience,” Friday, October 21 and Saturday, October 22, 2022, Neuropsychoanalysis Association (available on video).