The Role of Family Life in Child Development

The simply worded topic of this Dialogue is most challenging and forces psychoanalysts to consider how much is known and how much more needs to be known. It involves consideration of (1) growth of innate personality formation of the individual child, i.e. the nature of maturation; (2) the relationship of nature and nurture—the influences of other human personalities upon the individual maturation, i.e. development; and (3) it involves, furthermore, the process of development of small group formation, i.e. the family. Considerations of the family process might be one of the applied fields of psycho-analytic inquiry.

Family life may be viewed from the standpoint of many disciplines of which psychoanalysis is only one. Anthropology, sociology, biology and general psychology have all contributed to this topic as well as the applied field of education. There is a need to reduce the 'Tower of Babel' dilemma, not by speech alone, but by sharing conceptual ideas of phenomena that are observed from multifaceted viewpoints. Presentday paradigms may be replaced by future ones that we do not envision at the moment.

Psychoanalysis, utilizing a structural meta-psychological approach, may well be proud of the evolving considerations of the child development process in the past 25 years. How can we best utilize our findings to influence family life in the field of preventive mental health? Most of us would wish to provide clinical succour to both the individual we psychoanalyse and the progeny they contribute for later family formation. Our analysing instrument creates but a small beam in the darkness of civilization.

From the vantage point of the clinical practice of child psychiatry, child analysis, and adult analysis, as well as the opportunity to teach psychoanalytic students, I am aware of the unique opportunities for variation in the life experiences and characterological developments of all individuals within their family grouping. The acute and chronic traumatic influ