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Many adult patients enter treatment with a rigid, highly resistant character structure, the product of self-protection against painful experiences with parents and caregivers. The difficulties these patients experience
range from an inability to recognize and name their feelings to an incapacity to carry out the more complex tasks of integrating positive and negative feelings toward self and other and managing the pain and anxiety of separations. Often, these patients also do not have enough impulse control to be able to contain and reflect on the sources of their feelings or to develop more adaptive, less self-destructive strategies for engaging with reality.
Analyzing these patients requires seemingly infinite patience and frustration tolerance. Change comes slowly and is difficult to see in the short term, generating doubt and uncertainty about the work and the analyst's role in it. Analysts in the throes of this, and particularly child analysts, have often dreamed of an alternative process, one that could prevent the development of pathology in adults by providing an environment for children in the earliest years of life, from birth to age five, that draws on psychoanalytic knowledge to operationalize and implement a psychoanalytic vision of normal development.
The Allen Creek Psychoanalytic Preschool in Ann Arbor, Michigan, described in this book, is a remarkable example of this. Designing and managing such a psychoanalytically oriented preschool requires addressing many difficult and complex issues. Decisions need to be made as to the aspects of normal development that are to be emphasized, and methods of teaching need to be developed that take into account the developmental transformations of the age groups in the school. An overarching conceptual framework must be developed, one that captures the essence of what the school aims to accomplish, in everyday language accessible to adults and children. This book's authors describe this as developing emotional mus