The Toronto Group

The Toronto Group continued its efforts to grapple with the complex task of thinking “neuropsychoanalytically.” We focused on case material to address some of the fundamental challenges facing society: living and dying, aggression, violence, and war.

Ceilidh Eaton Russell presented moving vignettes of her work with children who are dying of brain cancer. Efforts are made to support, to the extent possible, a lively engagement with the remainder of life by promoting a sense of active agency employing effective communication with the significant adults in a child's life. This involves inventiveness, especially with children with brainstem tumors that profoundly affect their ability to speak and to accomplish motor tasks, and the ability on the part of professionals to bear difficult affects. Computer-based tools helped with the child's ambiguous efforts to communicate, in effect augmenting the body ego. Parents and siblings were helped to interpret their child's waning signals, promoting healthy mastery in the final days and the ability to move on with their lives.

Programs that support family denial may result from countertransference responses on the part of professionals. The Group struggled with the tendency to reduce to a deficit, neuro-anatomical point of view. Shame, helplessness, nonverbalized aggression within families, and regression to egocentric and magical thinking work against the psychoanalytic perspective (e.g., Furman, 1974).

Dr. Jim Deutsch discussed three children with epilepsy where aggression was the primary identified issue. A 4 1/2-year-old boy frequently became rageful with his mother, in relation to a somewhat absent, loved, but feared father. They were all helped when his early oedipal struggles could be clarified. A 17-year-old young man exploded in rage when experiencing shame and humiliation, following his surgery for benign right temporal astrocytoma. He and his parents were moved when they could understand a particular moment of desperation