Child & Adolescent Psychoanalytic Education

Description

The candidates completing the Child and Adolescent Analysis Program have achieved a singular appreciation of normal growth and maturation as well as the forces that interfere with an orderly developmental progression. They have also acquired the clinical tools to help troubled infants, children, and adolescents to resume more adequate development.

Child analysts aid children with a broad range of psychological disorders that disturb the child’s sense of well-being and capacities for emotional, social, and intellectual growth and development. Chronic or acute depression, anxieties, worries, fears, or conflicts can create difficulties, sometimes in the form of recognizable symptoms such as lying, stealing, bed-wetting, tics, night terrors, and hair pulling. At other times they show as personality peculiarities, as difficulties in school, family relationships, peer relationships, or as disturbances in mood and self esteem.

Child and adolescent psychoanalysis is based on a theoretical framework for understanding the emotional life of children and adolescents and is based on the observation that children are often unaware of the reasons for their unhappiness. Because factors leading to psychological distress are unconscious, the advice, encouragement, or limit setting of parents, teachers, or friends often fail to provide lasting relief. The goal of child and adolescent psychoanalysis is the removal of psychological roadblocks that are interfering with normal development. In a relationship with a trusted, helpful, and specially trained Child Analyst, the young child or adolescent is helped to become aware of the underlying causes of his or her unhappiness and/or dysfunctional behavior and to develop self understanding and new and abiding ways of coping. Varying techniques are employed to deal with the developmental capacities and vulnerabilities of children of different ages. For instance, the very young patient is helped to reveal his or her innermost wishes and worries, not only through words, but also through play. The therapeutic work with any child or adolescent widens his or her self-knowledge by reducing what must be kept out of awareness, freeing the young person of symptoms and inhibitions that have stood in the way of psychological growth.

CPI Child and Adolescent Faculty Gathering 2024