With the push toward accountability and test performance in schools there has been a decline in emphasis on creativity, imagination, and feelings in schools. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools is designed for students and professionals who are interested in restoring such values to their work with children. There is an absence of psychoanalytic ways of thinking in conventional professional discourses of schooling. With a few notable exceptions, the discourses of child development, classroom management, early childhood education, special education, school psychology, and school counseling have constructed notions of children and schooling that are often behaviorist, instrumental, and symptom-focused. Curriculum too often focuses on acquisition of knowledge and behaviors; discipline is conceptualized as compliance, and symptoms such as anger, school resistance, etc., are pathologized and reacted to out of context; children’s special needs are often conceptualized instrumentally; and children with complex psychological symptoms are delimited, depersonalized, or simply removed. Professionals who work with children psychodynamically draw on diverse frameworks including the work of Anna Freud, the long tradition of the Tavistock Clinic in London [e.g., Anne Alvarez, Susan Reid, Margaret Rustin, Frances Tustin, etc.], the writings of Klein, Winnicott, and their colleagues, French analysts [e.g., Piera Aulagnier, Didier Anzieu, Laurent Danon-Boileau, Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, and Catherine Mathelin] and Italian infant/child analyst Alessandro Piontelli. This work is valuable but often inaccessible to school professionals because the writing is somewhat specialized, and because there is no tradition of teaching such work in professional preparation in those fields. This collection is theoretically grounded in that the authors share a commitment to valuing children’s emotions and understand the usefulness of psychoanalytic approaches for enhancing children’s lives. It is laden with examples to invite into this discussion those students and professionals who value these ideas but for whom this book may be their first introduction to progressive educational ideals and psychodynamic ways of working with children. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools provides an introductory volume to open the door to the possibility of introducing psychodynamic frameworks to education and human service professors and school professionals and professionals working with children.

For school professionals seeking to work in emotionally focused ways with children, this book offers a wide range of essays illustrating how psychodynamic ideas can be used to validate children, respect the contexts of their families and communities, and create non-authoritari...

For school professionals seeking to work in emotionally focused ways with children, this book offers a wide range of essays illustrating how psychodynamic ideas can be used to validate children, respect the contexts of their families and communities, and create non-authoritarian classrooms and schools in which such children might develop to their fullest potential.

The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education presents various theories of play and demonstrates how it serves communicative, developmental, and relational functions, highlighting the importance and development of the capacity to play in terms useful to early childhood educators. The book explicitly links trauma, development, and interventions in the early childhood classroom specifically for teachers of young children, offering accessible information that can help teachers better understand the meanings of children’s expressive acts. Contributors from education, psychoanalysis, and developmental psychology explore techniques of play, how cultural influences affect how children play, the effect of trauma on play, factors that interfere with the ability to play, and how to apply these ideas in the classroom. They also discuss the relevance of ideas about playfulness for teachers and other professionals. The Imprtance of Play in Early Childhood Education will be of great interest to teachers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists as well as play therapists and developmental psychologists.

Current educational policies, particularly in the United States, have swung so far in the direction of overtly politicized and decontextualized testing, that we are losing opportunities to support the imaginative and expressive capacities of a generation of children and adolescents with implications for our individual and collective health. Enter arts education and the healing arts as urgently needed remedies for this imbalance, to swing the pendulum of educational practices back to a place of balance and wholeness. Informed by an arts-based sensibility, this book explores how imaginative, creative, and artistic experiences can heal, and why we urgently need them at the heart of our educational discourses and practices. These chapters invite teachers, teacher educators, and therapeutic professionals to reclaim imaginative, arts-based experiences as central to the human conditions that they serve. The narratives and case studies included here are of interest for any arts-based qualitative research course as an example of narrative inquiry, and in arts and general education programs for their pedagogical implications. “As Blake invited us to find the world in a grain of sand and showed us how poetry could materialize this, so too these storytellers discover and shape their personal meanings in ceramic pots, paintings, poems, drama, and poetry. While the stories told here are deeply ingrained interior journeys, all reflect ways of observing and embracing the world of others, of becoming wise, becoming self, and becoming skilled practitioners of meaning making. By naming and framing they suggest that clarity becomes possible and personal freedom achieved.” – Judith M. Burton, Teachers College, Columbia (from the Foreword) “This anthology offers a substantial number of narratives that represent seeking wholeness, sustenance, and renewal. In many cases, the authors provide a tribute to those who have impacted their lives in profound ways. This is an important contribution to both art education and literary education in the world of scholarly research.” – Laurel H. Campbell, Purdue University

Contemporary psychodynamic theory profoundly impacts our understanding of the development of psychopathology in children and adolescents. This book creates new concepts derived from contemporary psychodynamic theory that necessitate a revision to the principles underlying our understanding of and approach to young patients in psychotherapy. Moreover, this book reviews recent contributions from contemporary two-person relational psychodynamic theory and makes use of detailed case examples to bring to life this theory’s practical applications in child and adolescent psychotherapy. Psychotherapists and students of psychotherapy will find this book a valuable source of information on contemporary psychodynamic theory and a useful resource for introducing a contemporary style into their practice, co-constructing with the patient a narrative to achieve the desired goals.

An accessible text for practitioners, students, and non-specialists about the practice of psychotherapy in South Africa. Psychoanalysis as a long term modality is inaccessible to the average South African. In this book the authors describe how psychoanalytically orientated or psychodynamic psychotherapy can be practiced as a short-term endeavour and applied to contemporary issues facing the country. Psychodynamic work is currently undertaken by clinical psychologists, therapists, clinicians, trainers, teachers, clinical supervisors, consultants and researchers working in university settings, state hospitals, community projects, private practice and research. The debates, clinical issues, therapeutic practice and nature of research covered in the book are widely representative of the work being done in the country. The need for shorter term therapy models and evidence-based interventions is as acute in global practice as it is locally. The lessons learned in South Africa have broader implications for international practitioners, and the authors stress the potential inherent in psychoanalytic theory and technique to tackle the complex problems faced in all places and settings characterised by increasing globalisation and dislocation. The book is structured in three main sections. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in South Africa is aimed at local and international practitioners and students, while non-specialist readers will find the text informative and accessible.