Analysts Apply Their Experience to Schools

When Marvin Margolis, then president of the APsaA, formed the Ad Hoc Committee on Liaison to the Schools, it was in recognition both of the tremendous possibilities for analysts to inform the lay public about analysis and also of the impressive work already being done by analysts in schools across the country, often without monetary compensation. As chair of the Ad Hoc Committee, it has been my [Diane Manning's] pleasure to learn more about the wide variety of interventions analysts are doing in schools.

As one becomes acquainted with the school-based activities of psychoanalysts, one cannot help but be impressed by the creativity and generosity of those who do this important work. The types of programs analysts offer to schools are as diverse and thoughtful as The American's membership. With apologies to the many deserving analysts not included, here are a few representative examples.

Some programs, like the outreach program of the Child Development Center of the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute, involve a significant number of psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals who have donated their time to preschools and child care centers for the past ten years. Each year, teachers in a dozen or so preschools and child care centers are helped to think about the children and families in their schools. Recognizing that not all children can be helped through this consultative approach, the Child Development Center has recently opened its own therapeutic preschool. Similarly, analysts Kerry and Jack Novick, Don and Kay Campbell, and others have opened the Allen Creek preschool in Ann Arbor, Mich. These newer efforts follow in the footsteps of the Lucy Daniels School in Durham, N.C., where Don Rosenblitt is the clinical director, and, of course, The Hanna Perkins School, which has taught us all so much about working with young children and their families.

There are many more such efforts by individual analysts around the country to help young children. Some of these projects focus on infants. Roy Aruffo's workshop, where analysts are offered a way to learn more about working with young children, has been a regular feature of the Fall Meetings. Nat Donson and Art Farley offer an ongoing workshop at the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's annual meeting. In Boston, Judy Yanof has provided low-cost conferences to providers and child care directors. In the Bay Area, Gil Kliman is using his “Cornerstone” method in a special education class within a public school system. Co-Chair Phyllis Cath runs a class on mental health issues in child care which is synergistically connected to the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute preschool consultation program. Zenobia Grusky, Marilyn Graddeck, Lori Rifkin, Joe Afterman, Eileen Keller, Barbara Sharp, and Janis Baeuerlen provide school and family consultation to preschool teachers and children.

Other analysts have focused on school-age children. Catherine Henderson, Robert Campbell, S. Mauser, and N. Magelssen have conducted workshops for teachers, children, and parents in Bellevue, Wash., and environs. Jonathan Cohen is working to provide helpful information to K-12 teachers about children's social and emotional development in New York City. William Granatir has provided analytic consultation in D.C. schools, and Bruce Sklarew has helped troubled youth with mourning and loss in Washington, D.C. Shahla Chehrazi has received a grant from the Haas Foundation to support a therapeutic classroom in a high-risk community in San Francisco.

The committee's next task is to try to find outside revenues that will help support and expand these activities. A step in that direction is to record the impressive array of interventions already under way in schools in a booklet that the Ad Hoc Committee or individual analysts can include as part of grant applications. [See box.]

Committee member Irving H. Berkovitz has been a pioneer in applying analytic principles and theory to school settings. His approach is to work with other helping professionals in the schools. He outlines a few of his accomplishments below.

Interns Work in Group Counseling

I [Irving Berkowitz] have been consulting for the past eight years to the School-Based Health Center in the Culver City Unified School District. This is sponsored and supported by a community agency, the Los Angeles Child Development Center, founded years ago by the. late Miriam Williams, a longtime member of The American. In my consultation I meet every week during the school year with social work and marriage, family, and child counseling (MFCC) interns who provide group and individual counseling to middle school and senior high school students, ages eleven through eighteen.

Every year a new group of social work interns selects this as their placement. Four licensed MSW or MFCC therapists attend the consultation occasionally as co-therapists. As a result of these interns' availability, it was possible to have ten therapy groups meeting in 1997–98, giving at least fifty students a chance to participate in group therapy. Most students in these groups often live in dysfunctional families and learned in the group the value of talking about feelings and problems. Frequently the group counseling helped students avoid serious harmful actions including violence, suicide, school failure, running away, and unwanted pregnancies.

One goal of this process was that by the end of the six months, the interns would be working alongside the co-therapist and able to run a group session alone, if necessary. Supervising them posed several problems. Foremost was how best to educate young therapists who were not too familiar with psychotherapy

generally or the special pitfalls of treating adolescents. They were less familiar with common adolescent behaviors — rapid mood changes, exquisite feelings of shame, battles with families, and occasionally desperate emotional investment in other peers to the point of abandonment of personal identity or safety. The interns' work with individuals was supervised by other program personnel, but the interns were less familiar with the rapid events that can occur in a group. Finally, in the course of supervision, didactic moments were often necessary, in which I would describe psychoanalytic aspects of adolescent dynamics and of group process.

At times I had to suggest techniques, such as using games or discussing music, films, or television programs as metaphors. Very few of the interns were familiar with play therapy techniques, often necessary in groups with younger teens, who are less verbal and more motile. The interns were more versed in verbal cognitive interaction with adult clients. Since the supervision was being conducted in a group, the interns learned also from observing the supervisor and hearing what was being said to the intern who was presenting. Often what the interns would say to each other was of value; at other times, it had to be reframed. I did not usually point out group process in the supervision. More often I would ask what their experiences had been in their own adolescence, to help them understand and empathize with the feelings of the teens in the groups.

In the twenty-five or so weekly meetings between October and April, I tried to focus on the interns' feelings about the teens and on psychoanalytic concepts of adolescent development. Many of the interns had been exposed to psychoanalytic writings in their coursework but had little concept of how to deal with these in the actual patient. One hour per week was often too short a time to hear about the four to six groups in depth. I asked for a description of each group member on paper at the beginning of the supervision, and I used this during the weeks of supervision as a guide to the problems and progress of each group member. I asked for a similar writeup at the end of group to assess what had been accomplished and what was still to be done, especially if the student was to enter a group the following year. One group did have consistent leadership and a core membership for five years, with striking benefits from such an intensive experience. More often, students stayed in their groups for one to two years.

In my analytic career I have had the good fortune to have consulted to school personnel in various other settings. During 1964–87, I was a half-time administrator in the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, which provided, I believe, the largest school consultation program in the world. During many of those years the department was headed by an analyst, Harry Brickman. In its heyday during the 1970s, this program provided 130 school consultation projects in schools, involving almost 100 mental health professionals including many psychoanalysts. Since then such projects have dwindled, consonant with the decline in funding for preventive projects and the increase in funding for direct services, for chronically mental ill adults and disabled children.