You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Hampstead Clinic received a request from Dr Kamilia Abdel Fattah, child psychiatrist and Director of the Centre for Childhood Studies, and from Miss Faiza Kamel, a psychoanalyst trained in London at the British Institute, to assist in their efforts to set up a training in child analysis. The Centre receives financial support from the University for this training, and the first group of students was made up of seven psychology graduates from Ein Shams University and two medical doctors. The students will treat children at the Centre and in selected Child Guidance Clinics. At present they are engaged in a variety of occupations such as paediatrics, teaching and clinical psychology. Miss Kamel has undertaken the personal analysis of the students but they have no-one to give theoretical and clinical seminars. They therefore requested that members of the Hampstead Clinic Staff should go to Cairo to teach. Because of the distance and cost, the only feasible way of arranging this seemed to be to send one Staff member at a time during the Hampstead Clinic's Christmas and Easter holidays to undertake an intensive block of teaching. I was the first person to do this and regarded it as an experiment to see what could be done in this rather unorthodox set-up, and to make plans for future visits.
I went for three weeks at Christmas. The students had been selected only in October, and had begun their personal analyses in November. In order to attend seminars they had to suspend their analysis for three weeks. Inevitably, at the beginning of a new course, there were many practical and administrative problems to be overcome.
In the actual teaching arrangements, the two main practical problems were shortage of books and the exhausting demands made on students and teacher in attempting to cram half a year's seminars into three weeks. There were 15 blocks of three hours in the three weeks.
In the learning process difficulties arose from language problems an