The mission of the American Psychoanalytic Foundation (APF) is to raise funds and sponsor programs promoting a better understanding of psychoanalysis and to encourage effective and innovative dissemination of psychoanalytic ideas and services to the public. The APF distributes funds to proposals that fulfill this mission statement, supporting projects that present a psychoanalytic point of view in unique and original ways and provide services to diverse populations.
Following are some programs that have been helped with APF funds recently. These are large, multi-year projects that require extensive budgets. APF believed in the excellence of these projects, but funded only a part.
Project Director, Beatrice Beebe, Columbia University
Since April 2002, the 9/11 Mothers and Young Children Project has provided a treatment program, with a research component, for women who were pregnant when widowed by the disaster of September 11, 2001, and their children. All services are free.
This project uniquely targets the needs of young children and provides treatment for the dyadic mother-child relationship. The children, now over five, are struggling, as are their siblings. The project offers three components:
Support groups for mothers and for mothers and children together to address the impact of traumatic loss.
Mother-child communication and bonding consultations using videotaped face-to-face interactions and video feedback that address paternal loss, mother-child communication, and child development. The tapes help the mother read the child's nonverbal communication and facilitate the child's ability to think about the lost father.
Children's groups that promote resiliency among children of similar ages who share the experience of parental loss and family crisis post 9/11.
The mission of the American Psychoanalytic Foundation (APF) is to raise funds and sponsor programs promoting a better understanding of psychoanalysis and to encourage effective and innovative dissemination of psychoanalytic ideas and services to the public.
A central accomplishment of the project has been keeping these mothers, who have many competing needs and stresses in their lives. Most of these mothers feel that they would have never sought therapy if not for 9/11. For some, this process took two years before they could develop a trusting relationship with the project.
Project Directors,
Paulene Popek and John Grienenberger, Community Foundation of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles
Several years ago, advances in attachment research helped spur the creation of a more cohesive theoretical model of early cognitive and emotional development that emphasized the centrality of the caregiver-child relationship. A group got together to see if they could figure out a way to apply these new concepts to parenting issues that would lead to the development of an outreach program. They wanted to know if they could teach groups of parents of preschool aged children to be more “reflective.” Was it possible to increase parents' capacity to think about their child as having a separate mind with intentions, desires, and motivations, and, as a result, be able to understand and react to their child's behavior in a different way? They piloted this program with several Head Start parent groups and the results were promising. Using the Parent Development Interview to measure reflective functioning, they found that over the 10-week workshop series, reflectiveness did increase and parents reported feeling more confident in their parenting and experienced fewer parent-child conflicts.
Having piloted a new and innovative program, they wanted to demonstrate program effectiveness and replicability for local and state funding. They asked for support from the APF to help develop a research design for an outreach program that would allow them to evaluate the effectiveness of this model. ThIs funding support has enabled them to move forward by hiring a research consultant who can help set up a protocol, and a recent graduate who will work with them in selecting potential parent populations.
Popek said, “We are pleased that the foundation supports programs that focus on the application of psychoanalytic ideas to community projects.”
Selma Duckler is chair of the American Psychoanalytic Foundation.
A Study Using Mentalization and Altruistic Bystanding to Change the School Climate in a Model Jamaican All-Age School
Director, Stuart W. Twemlow, President of the International Association for Applied Psychoanalytic Studies
This project in Jamaica seeks to examine the core processes involved in creating change in a school climate which is more violent than most U.S. schools. Solid research to support this effort was demonstrated in a three-year U.S. study sponsored by the Menninger Clinic Child and Family Program, in which a derivative of this approach was studied using randomized controlled trials involving nine schools and approximately 4,000 children.
This research tests two hypotheses: The first is that the “process” of thinking about (mentalizing) power dynamics and values, including respect, friendship, bullying, victimization, and pathological bystanding, along with application of altruism and the selection and training of natural leaders can reduce victimization for school children in grades three to nine in an evolving nation. The second is that teacher and student “buy-in” or motivation is a major variable in positive school climate change.
The intervention works with a crafts program for seventh to ninth grade boys and girls known to have failed streaming academic tests in Jamaica. These young people, inadvertently humiliated by the academic system, naturally become bullies because all other children and teachers know they are academic failures, and respond to them as dumb. Reactively, they assert their power through domination, the only social skill they have in such an adverse climate.
This program identifies such children as a potential natural helping group whose power will be altered by our intervention, from coercive bullying to adopting a helpful leadership role for younger children.
Outreach to Colleagues: A Symposium on Mirror Neurons, Empathy, Intuition, and Interpretation for the Coming American Psychiatric Association Meeting
Director Regina Pally: “This will be of great interest to a large number of psychiatrists from around the country and from other countries. By exposing neuroscientists to our ideas, they will be more able and willing to incorporate these ideas into their research projects.”
Social Issues: A Community Outreach Workshop on Prejudice in Everyday Life, Sponsored by the Houston Galveston Psychoanalytic Society
Director Sharon Gerber: “We hope to attract…mental health professionals from hospitals, schools, universities, members in our society, attorneys, and others. Prejudice is ubiquitous…other communities could find an attorney or spokesperson from other professions available to them and replicate this program.
APF welcomes your unique proposal. See our section on the APsaA Web site for details: Go to , click on American Psychoanalytic Foundation Committee or contact Selma Duckler at or Dean K. Stein, APsaA executive director, at .