Author: Staff Writer

Much of the work that goes on in psychoanalysis focuses on modifying the behaviors that arise in some patients in response to traumatic experience. Writing about his experiences treating sexually abused boys, Massachusetts analyst Stephen Prior notes how “neglect and abuse distort fundamental needs and psychic structures in the child.” He writes that “the psychological…

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of mental health professionals writing about childhood grief and trauma gradually came to an agreement about how the relationship between them had long been overlooked by their fellow clinicians. They agreed as well that the loss of a parent constitutes a psychic trauma in children, with…

Clinicians with a psychodynamic orientation have long recognized the role of suppressed anger in the onset of depression. One body of research has found that releasing anger in therapy sessions can help allay some of the symptoms of depression, particularly for patients whose condition has not improved using other therapeutic methods. A group of European…

Depression and anxiety are closely related because each feeling is a reaction to stressful events. Patients who have endured such events in the past or present will often feel depressed about it, while they will feel anxiety because they are worried about such events happening in the future. Patients may suppress the impulses that they…