More Light for a Darker Age: Contextualist Sensibilities in Child and Adolescent Treatment

Abstract

This article introduces several articles (in this current issue) centered on contemporary, psychoanalytically informed clinical treatments of children and adolescents. In doing so, it revisits the concept of expansionism in psychoanalytic self psychology and underscores a new type of “expansionism”: The application of contemporary theories to non-psychoanalytic clinical milieus, particularly those pertaining to contexts of working with children and adolescents.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• expansionism
• children
• adolescents
• politics

Notes

¹I am indebted to Nancy VanDerHeide and to Kristen Leishman for their invaluable editorial suggestions in the preparation of this manuscript.