Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysts in the Community: SCARY Books and Movies

During 2011-12, the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis initiated an ongoing Case Conference designed to bring local clinicians together to discuss topics of psychoanalytic interest. We meet once a month in Bethesda, Maryland, and open our discussions with clinical presentations by psychoanalysts. Michael Jasnow and I, both child-adolescent psychoanalysts, titled our March 9, 2012, presentation “Scary Books and Movies—Their Role in Child Development and in the Treatment of Children and Adolescents—Where the Wild Things Really Are.”

Making Use of Displacement

This presentation, the first child-adolescent topic for our new conference, drew the largest number of clinicians to date and stimulated a very lively discussion. The attendees included psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, and even a family practitioner from another country who was visiting grandchildren in suburban DC. I spoke about how our most fruitful work with children and adolescents occurs when they are able to bring their inner lives into the sessions, often in the form of displacements to books they are reading or movies they have seen.

I used the series of Harry Potter books as an example. I based my discussion on the ideas I had expressed in my TAP article (“Harry Potter's Popularity Rooted in the Emotional Life of Children,” TAP 41/3), explaining how author JK Rowling provides a forum to engage children in stories that capture universal childhood conflicts. I described the Harry Potter novels as modern day fairy tales that can help a child or adolescent master troubling emotions such as jealousy of siblings, death wishes towards rivals, or feelings of helplessness. By fighting the evil wizard Voldemort (a projection of the young person's unacceptable and dangerous feelings), Harry fights to master his own vulnerabilities and troubling emotions, as the young reader must also do in the process of growing up.

Michael Jasnow spoke about children's play and fantasy. He described recent neuroscientific findings that update our understanding of the developmental importance of play. He related this to books and movies that our child and adolescent patients bring into our consulting rooms. He then gave three engaging clinical examples, illustrating how he uses his child patients' displacements to help them master their fears and conflicts.

Several clinicians attending the conference described the challenges they faced treating children and adolescents at local clinics or in their private practices, such as difficulties helping religious parents accept their children's interest in reading the Harry Potter books, or understanding the raging interest in The Hunger Games among seventh and eighth graders, or engaging children with ADHD in mastering impulsivity through play.

The conference stimulated such interest and lively discussion that we continued our child and adolescent topics during 2012-13. For example, Charles Parks presented “Alterations of Defense in Psychoanalytic Treatment,” describing the three-year analysis of a girl suffering from a traumatic neurosis. And Marc Nemiroff presented and discussed his work with children in the Bombay slums and in a tribal village in India in “Losing Myself and Being Myself in India: Lessons from Working Outside One's Culture.” During our May 10, 2012, program, Robert Nover discussed “We Are All Living and Dying Every Moment—Psychotherapy with Acutely Ill and Dying Children and Adults: Principles and Practice.”