A new psychoanalytic subspecialty has recently been defined: the community psychoanalyst. Schools are one prominent setting for this practice. Analytic work with children began with Freud's consultation about Little Hans; it advanced through the creation of child psychoanalysis by Anna Freud and Melanie Klein; and it expanded its horizons with August Aichhorn's work with delinquent adolescents.
Analysts who work with children have typically been involved with aberrant behavior and, in schools, with special education. Gilbert Kliman's Cornerstone Project, reported in TAP in 1997, is an outstanding example and resulted in the prevention of multiple foster home placements. Many programs are geared to early intervention with preschool children. A fine example is Donald Rosenblitt's work at the award-winning Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood (TAP 39/2).
Redl and Wineman were the first to extend psychoanalytic ideas to the general classroom and school setting in 1957. More recently, systematic approaches have been developed for kindergarten through high school years. Bruce Sklarew's clinical/research collaboration with the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing—the School-based Mourning Project in Washington, D.C.—is one important example. Innovative group techniques developed by Dottie Ward-Wimmer provide inner-city children opportunities to deal with their common experience of grievous loss associated with the multiple traumas of lives of poverty. Stuart Twemlow's team's innovative work on bullying is another admirable enterprise (TAP 39/1). Identifying the role of “bystander” and developing teaching strategies for undermining peer tolerance for bullying have led to improving both the social and the intellectual climate in elementary schools. Robert Pynoos works in schools for traumatized children. In locations such as Columbine High School, Los Angeles, Armenia, and Bosnia-Herzogovina, his interventions have enhanced the recovery of students and staff, improved overall functioning, and contributed to a healthy school atmosphere.
Analysts have also been involved in curriculum development. Carol Kusché and Mark Greenberg have created an approach to the “regular” classroom, Promoting Alternate Thinking Strategies (PATHS). Elementary school teachers are trained to teach emotional literacy as a regular “subject” along with reading, math, and the rest of the standard curriculum. Henri Parens made the teaching of parenting skills the core of his approach to providing curriculum for 5- to 18-year-olds in regular school classrooms.
Others have developed collaborative efforts to provide clinical consultation for pupils, faculty, and administration. Art Farley and Diane Manning provide a multi-tiered approach to supporting children's emotional development, including consultation with teachers, a therapeutic school for 3- to 8-year-olds, and parent assistance for children in psychoanalysis. William Granatir, following his retirement from clinical practice at age 76, has been a volunteer school psychoanalyst for the past 13 years. He organized a demonstration clinic in a Washington, D.C. inner-city elementary school and acted as liaison between the highest levels of the mental health and education systems.
Beyond the participation of well-trained analysts, what makes these programs analytic? Each takes as basic the importance of unconscious mental life, emotional development, and the interrelatedness of social, emotional, and cognitive growth. Each, whether working with pupils, their parents, or school staff and leaders, focuses on the meaning of behavior They differ from clinical psychoanalysis in that the analyst is a team member with other respected professionals, rather than an authority imposing expertise with esoteric methodology. Where clinical psychoanalysis analyzes transference and resistance, school psychoanalysts use their understanding to modify more directly these phenomena for the benefit of the children and the school community (Jonathan Cohen is preparing a more complete review of psychoanalysis and education, including a critique of its limitations.)
To promote and coordinate these many efforts, APsaA has created a Liaison to Schools Committee, co-chaired by Cohen and Stephen Kerzner. This committee is developing a database of school projects, in the hope of generating more systematized research on analyst-educator collaboration. The committee has also created a $1000 award, co-sponsored by APsaA, the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies (IJAPS), and the educational journal, School: Studies in Education. For information about the award and submission guidelines, see .
“Applied psychoanalysis” has been disparaged by clinical psychoanalysts for far too long. Despite his expressed wish that psychoanalytic technique be modified for its more widespread utility, Freud's own “alloy” metaphor may have promoted this attitude. But alloys are created because they are stronger than pure elements. While research is yet to establish the strength of school psychoanalysis, Freud thought education to be the most important of applications.
The projects reported here should help to end the false conflict between clinical psychoanalysis and community work, and will surely upgrade the public image of our science and discipline.
(A reference list of the projects cited in this article is available from .)
Jeffrey H. Golland, Ph.D., is a teaching, training, and supervising analyst for The New York Freudian Society, and clinical instructor in psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. For 35 years he was a teacher educator at the City University of New York.
Bruce Sklarew, M.D., is co-editor of Analysts in the Trenches: Streets, Schools, War Zones, former chair of APsaA's Committee on Psychoanalysis and the Community, and co-chair of the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film.