Fifteen years ago, Eleanor Pavenstedt strongly advocated more analytic attention toward disadvantaged children. Viennese child analysts of 1920 learned from analyses of poor children, and a wealth of useful data still pours from Anna Freud's Hampstead Clinic. Spurred by Pavenstedt's determination, the Vulnerable Child Discussion Group was instituted in 1969 under the direction of the Committee on Social Issues. A Subcommittee on Vulnerable Children has evolved, which organizes continuing discussion groups at each meeting of the American. The scope has broadened to vulnerability and risk, using E. James Anthony's schema of vulnerability as internal, congenital or perinatal; risk referring to stresses, such as deprivation, illness or mistreatment.
At each four-hour session, which is taped and summarized for distribution, we hear three brief, relevant presentations of ongoing research, providing focus on a specific aspect of vulnerability or risk. Active general discussion follows opening remarks by someone chosen because of particular expertise in the current subject. We have examined narcissistic rage reactions in inner city infants and vicissitudes of infantile deprivation. We have discussed analyses of vulnerable and high risk children and adults, which have been presented by Jerome Karasic, Chairman of the Committee on Social Issues, by J. Alexis Burland and Paulina Kernberg. Eleanor Galenson has also presented and discussed case material.
At the spring meeting of the American in Quebec City, the Vulnerable Child Subcommittee organized the first session of an interdisciplinary seminar, “Child at Risk-Child Abuse,” in which Brandt Steele shared some of his experiences from fifteen years of work with abused children. The “Child at Risk” seminar in New York on December 18, 1977 will center on research of JoAnn Fineman and Marguerite Smith, “Some Effects of Lost Adolescence: The Child-Mothers and their Babies.”
Work by Anna Freud, Mahler, Kohut and the Kernbergs has provided insight into the murky psychopathology of handicapped children, a population estimated at eight million in the United States alone. The vast number of children affected by the high risk or negative environments of neglect, abuse or deprivation; children who suffer from parent loss due to death, or divorce, or from parent insufficiency due to illness, defective or too-young or single parents, present us with complex analytic questions for which these group seeks answers. Within the discussion group there has been a continuing interest in developing an integration of structural theory and concepts of separation-individuation, object relations and narcissism as they apply to vulnerable children.
At the December 15, 1977 New York meeting, the group will focus on the development of aggression in normal and vulnerable children. Judith Kestenberg, John McDevitt and Martha Kirkpatrick will each present current work, with Eli Marcovitz as the opening discussant.
Theodore B. Cohen
Chairman