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.
Over the last ten years we have seen an increasing acceptance of the general idea of working with parents of child patients. What remains, however, as an area of controversy, conflict, and resistance, is the question of whether and how much therapists should or can work with the parents of adolescent patients. Questions cluster around how to maintain confidentiality and lead to the even larger issue of conceptualizing the developmental goals of the phase of adolescence.
We see the major developmental tasks for both parents and adolescents as involving transformation of the self and the relationship, in the context of separateness rather than separation. If adolescent therapists work from the assumption that the goal of adolescence is transformation, concurrent work with parents and adolescents will move them all into a new level of relationship. Without concomitant change in parents, it is doubly hard for adolescents to progress into adulthood.
In this paper we offer clinical material from five older adolescents and their parents to illustrate the techniques that follow from our model of dynamic concurrent parent work throughout the phases of treatment.
Jack Novick is a Training Analyst of the International Psychoanalytic Association and on the faculties of numerous institutes. Formerly Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology, Departments of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University, he also chaired the Child Psychoanalysis Training at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute.
Kerry Kelly Novick is a Training Analyst of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Also on the faculties of numerous institutes, she was formerly Lecturer in Psychoanalysis, University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry, President of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis, and a founder of Allen Creek Preschool.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 67, ed. Claudia Lament, Robert A. King, Samuel Abrams, A. Scott Dowling, and Paul M. Brinich (Yale University Press, copyright © 2013 by Claudia Lament, Robert A. King, Samuel Abrams, A. Scott Dowling, and Paul M. Brinich).
Using the tasks of the therapeutic alliance as a conceptual framework, we describe working toward the dual goals of restoration to the path of progressive development and restoration of the parent-child relationship. We pay particular attention to the unfolding of conflicts between closed-system omnipotent functioning and open-system reality mastery, and the role of fathers in late-adolescent development.