Foster Care: The Personal Life History Book: A Psychoanalytically Based Intervention for Foster Children

America's half a million foster children are the responsibility of all and a worry to all who care about the upcoming generation. Foster children are excessively represented among older children who populate special education classes, homeless shelters, jails, and mental health facilities. As adolescents, many foster children soon begin making new generations of foster children. Foster children are recipients of often quite belated and costly treatment for deeply ingrained mental disorders that are greatly aggravated by multiple transfers among foster homes. It therefore makes good clinical, social, and economic sense to try to prevent the aggravating influence of unstable placements in this pathology-prone population.

I have long been interested in applications of psychoanalytic theory and technique to preventive interventions with children (see Kliman, “Nursery,” “Cornerstone,” “Preventive,” “Summary,” and “Breakthrough”). I have been especially interested in preventing the effects of severe traumas by enhancing the personal narrative and related sublimative activities of young children (see Aust; Klagsbrun and Kliman; Kliman, “Nursery”; Kliman and Rosenfeld; Lopez and Kliman, “Mommy” and “Cornerstone”; Stein and Kliman; Kliman, Oklan and Wolfe). Systematic preventive interventions with foster children have increasingly been my focus (see Kliman, “Summary” and “Breakthrough”). In designing an intervention program for foster children, I hypothesized that the adversities preceding being placed in foster care involved a frequently traumatic set of stresses whose pathological social consequences could be the target of the preventive intervention. These prior adversities include relationship deficiency, relationship toxicity, and relationship discontinuity stresses: neglect, abuse, rejection, and ultimately the loss of family relationships. I formulated the following general hypothesis covering all these adversities and incorporating an operationally measurable social c