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Imitation in development and in developmental failure: A case study based on a Child’s Psychotherapy
Get PDFThis is a single case study of a child patient. The research uses detailed written notes
of a child patient’s intensive psychotherapy sessions to explore the phenomena of
imitative and repetitive (self imitating) behaviour that was a central part of her
presence within the treatment relationship.
It examines the contrasting place of imitation in the psychological and psychoanalytic literature. The former has concentrated on episodes of imitation, their role in
cognitive and social development, and the inhibition/absence of imitation in autism.
Imitation has received much less attention within the psychoanalytic literature as it is
regarded as part of the wider growth of the identification process within the mind.
In this literature, it is the presence (rather than absence) of a particular form of
imitative identification in autism that is thought to inhibit development and its
association with deficiencies in identification processes.
The research systematically examines the patient’s material in order to identify the
various forms and patterning of imitative behaviours/scenarios; to suggest its
purposes and functions for the child; and to frame a hypothesis as to its contradictory
impact on her development.
The empirical data suggested that the patient’s imitative behaviour served several
purposes both developmental and non-developmental. Among the developmental
purposes, the patient’s imitation was strongly related to language acquisition, memory
and cognitive and social development in line with the experimental findings of
cognitive, social and developmental psychology. However, imitations were also
used by the patient in a manner that that could be characterised as non or antidevelopmental, a phenomenon rarely discussed in the experimental literature. Some
such episodes could be described, within a psychoanalytic framework, as being used
to defend against particular feelings associated with an awareness of being a child
dependent on adults. For this patient, imitation was a pervasive aspect of a way of
being and of relating to others
Forensic group psychotherapy: The Portman Clinic approach
No full textForensic Group Psychotherapy: The Portman Clinic Approach stands as a comprehensive account of theoretical and practical approaches to the group treatment of patients who present with problematic sexual behaviour, criminality, and violence. The first section of the book focuses upon key aspects of group analytic theory as applied to clinical work with forensic patients and describes how to provide a setting in which treatment can proceed. This is followed by a series of chapters with a clinical emphasis, providing a rich and evocative account of the challenges of working with forensic patients in groups. The guiding principle is the need to understand and work with the victim within the perpetrator. This book is a must for any clinician working with forensic patients in groups. Though based on the work of an outpatient clinic, there are ideas and techniques that can be applied to many other settings, including prison, probation, and inpatient
The coherence of autism
No full textThere is a growing body of opinion that we should view autism as fractionable into different, largely independent sets of clinical features. The alternative view is that autism is a coherent syndrome in which principal features of the disorder stand in intimate developmental relationship with each other. Studies of congenitally blind children offer support for the latter position and suggest that a source of coherence in autism is restriction in certain forms of perceptually dependent social experience
Sex versus survival: The life and ideas of Sabina Spielrein
No full textWho was Sabina Spielrein? Her dramatic life story is most famous for her notorious affair with Carl Jung, dramatised in the film A Dangerous Method starring Keira Knightley. Yet she was a woman who overcame family and psychiatric abuse to become an original thinker in the field of psychotherapy. This is the first biography to put her life and ideas at the centre of the story, and to examine Spielreins key role in the development of psychoanalysis and in the rift between Jung and Freud. Drawing on fresh research into Spielreins diaries, papers and correspondence, John Launer tells the story of a passionate woman who transformed herself from one of Jungs disturbed patients into a leading figure in Western psychology, then the Soviet intelligentsia, before losing her life in the Holocaust. At the heart of Sex Versus Survival is the gripping tale of Spielrein and Jungs tumultuous affair, which played such an important role in both of their lives and intellectual journeys. Launer shows how Spielreins overlooked ideas rejected by Jung and Freud, but substantially vindicated by later developments in psychology and evolutionary biology may represent the last and most important stage in the rediscovery of an extraordinary life
The body of the analyst and the analytic setting: Reflections on the embodied setting an the symbiotic transference
No full textIn this paper the author questions whether the body of the analyst may be helpfully conceptualized as an embodied feature of the setting and suggests that this may be especially helpful for understanding patients who develop a symbiotic transference and for whom any variance in the analyst's body is felt to be profoundly destabilizing. In such cases the patient needs to relate to the body of the analyst concretely and exclusively as a setting 'constant' and its meaning for the patient may thus remain inaccessible to analysis for a long time. When the separateness of the body of the analyst reaches the patient's awareness because of changes in the analyst's appearance or bodily state, it then mobilizes primitive anxieties in the patient. It is only when the body of the analyst can become a dynamic variable between them (i.e. part of the process) that it can be used by the patient to further the exploration of their own mind
