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Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA): Exploring the behavioural profile
No full text‘Pathological Demand Avoidance’ is a term increasingly used by practitioners in the United Kingdom. It was coined to describe a profile of obsessive resistance to everyday demands and requests, with a tendency to resort to ‘socially manipulative’ behaviour, including outrageous or embarrassing acts. Pathological demand avoidance is thought to share aspects of social impairment with autism spectrum disorders, but autism spectrum disorder–appropriate strategies, such as routine and repetition, are described as unhelpful. Outrageous acts and lack of concern for their effects draw parallels with conduct problems and callous-unemotional traits. However, reward-based techniques, effective with conduct problems and callous-unemotional traits, seem not to work in pathological demand avoidance. Despite increasing interest and controversy over the pathological demand avoidance label, there is only one published study to date. We present the first systematic comparison of the behavioural profile of children receiving the term pathological demand avoidance (N = 25) to children with autism spectrum disorders (N = 39) or conduct problems and callous-unemotional traits (N = 28), using parent-report indices of psychopathology. The pathological demand avoidance group displayed comparable levels of autistic traits and peer problems to the autism spectrum disorders group and anti-social traits approaching those seen in the conduct problems and callous-unemotional traits group. Emotional symptoms in pathological demand avoidance exceeded both comparison groups. Findings highlight the extreme behavioural impairment associated with pathological demand avoidance and the need to explore whether behavioural overlap reflects a similar neurocognitive basis to existing groups
The violent true believer as a “Lone Wolf” – Psychoanalytic perspectives on terrorism
No full textThe existing research on lone wolf terrorists and case experience are reviewed and interpreted through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. A number of characteristics of the lone wolf are enumerated: a personal grievance and moral outrage; the framing of an ideology; failure to affiliate with an extremist group; dependence on a virtual community found on the Internet; the thwarting of occupational goals; radicalization fueled by changes in thinking and emotion – including cognitive rigidity, clandestine excitement, contempt, and disgust – regardless of the particular ideology; the failure of sexual pair bonding and the sexualization of violence; the nexus of psychopathology and ideology; greater creativity and innovation than terrorist groups; and predatory violence sanctioned by moral (superego) authority. A concluding psychoanalytic formulation is offered
Top down and bottom up: Trauma, executive functioning, emotional regulation, the brain and child psychotherapy
No full textThis paper attempts to integrate psychoanalytic thinking with understandings about executive functions as well as with recent neurobiological research. A clinical case is described in detail to illustrate the need, as Anne Alvarez has proposed, to work at the appropriate level for the child’s development. Links are made to Freud’s thinking about the ego as well as to contemporary neuroscience. It is suggested that maltreatment, both abuse and neglect, gives rise to serious developmental deficits, such as in processing emotions, planning, using working memory and indeed in basic thinking capacities. It is argued that therapeutic technique must be adjusted to take this into account and that there are opportunities for further research into these issues
Graham Music on Woman's Hour. Interview about empathy. 12 July 2014, BBC Radio 4 [Starts at 10:25]
No full textWhat is empathy? We discover how being empathetic is good for our mental health
Collaborer, contenir, inspirer confiance: Physiothérapie avec une enfant qui ne parle pas, ne marche pas, ne s’alimente pas
No full textHistory as tragedy, never as farce: Tracing the long cultural narrative of child protection in England
Get PDFA short psychosocial history of British child abuse and protection: Case studies in problems of mourning in the public sphere
Get PDFThis paper offers a historical and psychosocial account of ‘moral panics’ about child maltreatment in England over the last four decades, and proposes this perspective as additional to Munro's more systemic account of the same history. The formal child protection system is theorised in terms of an explicit and a covert dual primary task. The overt task is to actually protect vulnerable children and prevent abuse; the covert task is to protect the remainder of society from exposure to anxiety provoking ‘dangerous knowledge’ about the prevalence of child maltreatment. Episodes of public and political moral panic occur when the boundaries of containment provided by the official system and its processes are breached, propelling debate and contestation about child maltreatment into the public sphere, where public enquiries and other social mechanisms are called upon to ‘settle’ the contested issues. Sometimes these social settlements appear to be successful in resolving conflicts about the reality or otherwise of specific forms of abuse; in other cases, especially child deaths, the controversial and anxiety-laden nature of the problem is recurrently projected back into the public domain. The paper suggests that this may be associated with a difficulty about establishing a secure symbolic framework or discourse in society for the emotionally indigestible facts of child torture and murder. In turn, this may be associated with problems about the decline of public mourning rituals and the failure of the public enquiry format to facilitate this. In line with Munro, the paper argues for the importance of a tragic perspective on child maltreatment, to counter idealisations of the capacity of the formal system to protect children
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy NOW 2013:‘Getting to grips with society's ills: A psychoanalytic perspective'
No full textThis Special Issue of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy draws together papers presented at the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy NOW conference ‘Getting to grips with society’s ills: a psychoanalytic perspective’, held in London on 5 October 2013. Inspired by the work of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), a British social policy research and development charity that funds a UK-wide research and development programme addressing the root causes of social problems, the conference sought to explore psychoanalytic perspectives on some of the key problems in today’s society identified by the JRF: the rise of individualism, consumerism and a decline of community; a decline of values; drugs and alcohol; families and young people; inequality and poverty; institutions, apathy and a democratic deficit
