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The 2011-2012 Scientific Meetings Series, dedicated to the 70th Anniversary of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, established in 1941 by Karen Horney and her colleagues, began with Dr. Susan Coates's presentation.
Susan Coates, Ph.D., faculty member at Columbia's University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Parent-Infant Psychotherapy Program began her talk with a brief history of the study of childhood trauma, dividing it into “three waves.” The first wave began with Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's study of children in London during the German blitz in World War II. They made the startling discovery that the children were much less traumatized by the life-threatening bombings than they were by the evacuations from London that separated them from their mothers (Freud and Burlingham, 1943). But, Coates said the full realization of the traumatic impact of separation of mother and child came from the legendary work of John Bowlby, whose then controversial film with , A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital, improved the fate of hospitalized children in the Western world.
The second wave of clinical research on traumatized children, begun in 1975 with Fraiberg's famous paper, “Ghosts in the Nursery,” (Fraiberg et al., 1975) focused on transmission of trauma from one generation to the next. It was timely because it coincided with a flood of adult children of Holocaust survivors beginning to seek help for mental health issues that had been unknowingly caused by transgenerational transmission of trauma.
Coates said, the third wave of infant trauma research began 10 years ago focusing on the “origin of risk factors that contributed to individual differences in PTSD.” These studies found that children exhibit the “classical triad of PTSD symptoms: re-experiencing, numbing/avoidance, and hyper-arousal,” but that these symptoms vary. “The relational nature of trauma has been demonstrated in several studies,” Coates said, showing worse child outcomes when family