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, Francoise 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.

Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C) with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach offers a new, short term psychotherapeutic approach to working dynamically with children who suffer from irritability, oppositional defiance and disruptiveness. RFP-C enables clinicians to help by addressing and detailing how the child's externalizing behaviors have meaning which they can convey to the child. Using clinical examples throughout, Hoffman, Rice and Prout demonstrate that in many dysregulated children, RFP-C can: Achieve symptomatic improvement and developmental maturation as a result of gains in the ability to tolerate and metabolize painful emotions, by addressing the crucial underlying emotional component. Diminish the child's use of aggression as the main coping device by allowing painful emotions to be mastered more effectively. Help to systematically address avoidance mechanisms, talking to the child about how their disruptive behavior helps them avoid painful emotions. Facilitate development of an awareness that painful emotions do not have to be so vigorously warded off, allowing the child to reach this implicit awareness within the relationship with the clinician, which can then be expanded to life situations at home and at school. This handbook is the first to provide a manualized, short-term dynamic approach to the externalizing behaviors of childhood, offering organizing framework and detailed descriptions of the processes involved in RFP-C. Supplying clinicians with a systematic individual psychotherapy as an alternative or complement to PMT, CBT and psychotropic medication, it also shifts focus away from simply helping parents manage their children's misbehaviors. Significantly, the approach shows that clinical work with these children is compatible with understanding the children's brain functioning, and posits that contemporary affect-oriented conceptualizations of defense mechanisms are theoretically similar to the neuroscience construct of implicit emotion regulation, promoting an interface between psychodynamics and contemporary academic psychiatry and psychology. Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C) with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach is a comprehensive tool capable of application at all levels of professional training, offering a new approach for psychoanalysts, child and adolescent counselors, psychotherapists and mental health clinicians in fields including social work, psychology and psychiatry.

Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C) with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach offers a new, short term psychotherapeutic approach to working dynamically with children who suffer from irritability, oppositional defiance and disruptiveness. RFP-C enables clinicians to help by addressing and detailing how the child's externalizing behaviors have meaning which they can convey to the child. Using clinical examples throughout, Hoffman, Rice and Prout demonstrate that in many dysregulated children, RFP-C can: Achieve symptomatic improvement and developmental maturation as a result of gains in the ability to tolerate and metabolize painful emotions, by addressing the crucial underlying emotional component. Diminish the child's use of aggression as the main coping device by allowing painful emotions to be mastered more effectively. Help to systematically address avoidance mechanisms, talking to the child about how their disruptive behavior helps them avoid painful emotions. Facilitate development of an awareness that painful emotions do not have to be so vigorously warded off, allowing the child to reach this implicit awareness within the relationship with the clinician, which can then be expanded to life situations at home and at school. This handbook is the first to provide a manualized, short-term dynamic approach to the externalizing behaviors of childhood, offering organizing framework and detailed descriptions of the processes involved in RFP-C. Supplying clinicians with a systematic individual psychotherapy as an alternative or complement to PMT, CBT and psychotropic medication, it also shifts focus away from simply helping parents manage their children's misbehaviors. Significantly, the approach shows that clinical work with these children is compatible with understanding the children's brain functioning, and posits that contemporary affect-oriented conceptualizations of defense mechanisms are theoretically similar to the neuroscience construct of implicit emotion regulation, promoting an interface between psychodynamics and contemporary academic psychiatry and psychology. Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C) with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach is a comprehensive tool capable of application at all levels of professional training, offering a new approach for psychoanalysts, child and adolescent counselors, psychotherapists and mental health clinicians in fields including social work, psychology and psychiatry.

Death is a much avoided topic. Literature on mourning exists, but it focuses chiefly upon the death of others. The inevitable psychic impact of one's own mortality is not optimally covered either in this literature on mourning or elsewhere in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The Wound of Mortality brings together contributions from distinguished psychoanalysts to fill this gap by addressing the issue of death in a comprehensive manner. Among questions the contributors raise and seek to answer are: Do children understand the idea of death? How is adolescent bravado related to deeper anxieties about death? Is it normal and even psychologically healthy to think about one's own death during middle age? Does culture-at-large play a role in how individuals conceptualize the role of death in human life? Is death "apart" from or "a part" of life? Enhanced understanding of such matters will help mental health clinicians treat patients struggling with death-related concerns with greater empathy.

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, Francoise 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.