Los Angeles Child Development Center: Example of Applied Psychoanalysis

The Los Angeles Child Development Center, now one of the few examples of applied psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, was founded in 1977 by Miriam Williams, a child analyst who had trained with Anna Freud in London. It was Williams's goal to provide disadvantaged children and their parents with low cost psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy. She initiated a “clinic without walls,” providing young therapists with training cases and free supervision from senior child analysts within a small nonprofit organization that supported her clinic.

In 1990, in order to reach more children, the board of the Los Angeles Child Development Center began a project to expand the perspective and use of psychoanalytic knowledge into school settings. Using the work of Selma Fraiberg as a guiding perspective and our experience in training young therapists as a model, we took our understanding of child development, psychoanalytic principles and psychosocial needs and moved our work onto all the campuses of the Culver City Unified School District where we provided a continuum of care from Pre-K to 12. There, we instituted a program to train psychology and social work interns in psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy for children. Our teachers and supervisors had all been educated in psychoanalytic training programs in Los Angeles: the New Center for Psychoanalysis, the Reiss-Davis Child Study Center and the Graduate Center for Psychotherapy.

In 2005, we began another Pre-K through 12 school-based counseling program with bilingual interns to more clearly address the needs of low-income immigrant Latino children and their families at the Camino Nuevo Charter Academy. In 2008, we were invited to apply our perspective at The Accelerated School, a national public-private partnership model for urban charter schools. Currently, within those three school systems, we offer service to over 14,000 children and work with over 650 children during each school year.

…within those three school systems, we offer service to over 14,000 children and work with over 650 children during each school year.

Benefits of the School Setting

The school setting itself provides a key cornerstone for our work. It lets us meet students where they are, as parents in these schools rarely have the time or money to bring them to a psychotherapist's office or clinic. More important, working in schools provides an ongoing context to observe and to evaluate a child's developmental progress. It allows us ongoing access to teachers and administrators with and for whom we provide support and guidance in understanding the internal sources of a child's behavior as well as the social and psychological norms in which it occurs.

The seven campuses of the Camino Nuevo Charter Academy provide an excellent example of the breadth and possibilities of our work. Jose and his mother Maria are good illustrations.* Like many other families at Camino Nuevo, Jose and Maria were first-year immigrants. Eight-year-old Jose longed for clarity, strength and structure. He found this in the notorious gang that had infiltrated the school neighborhood. In October of his second-grade year he was recruited by the gang to deliver messages, adopting the tough swagger of his mentors. With our understanding of development, we saw that Jose had not successfully achieved latency, so we suggested he join a group of strongly aggressive second graders most of whom suffered from the loss of an absent father. Happily, the group was run by a U.S. Marine Corps officer finishing his doctoral requirements in psychology. The group provided, as Selma Fraiberg suggests, safe conditions for self-observation and a protected space for Jose and the other boys to explore their terror and rage as well as a new more positive model for identification. This group is now in its third year, each year adding new recruits.

It has become a touchstone in the school for the acknowledgment of how an inner world filled with fear and conflict can be mediated using our psychoanalytic knowledge, our understanding of child development and social and cultural norms to create conditions for self-observation and growth.

Maria, Jose's mother, formed another part of our work with Jose. We have found, as have many current child analysts, that work with the parents can help support their children's growth and significantly improve the long-term sustainability of ego development. This is especially important at Camino Nuevo as the trauma of the immigration journey and immigrant experience is an ominous and pervasive shadow for the majority of families at school. As with Jose, Maria, too, was frightened by the gangs that surrounded the neighborhood and her anxiety increased her harsh and hysterical discipline of her son. We offered her a parent group for immigrant mothers run by one of our interns who had a similar experience. In the group, Maria learned her anxieties were shared among the other mothers. Hearing their stories, she learned how to listen more effectively to her son, tolerating his painful feelings and memories and mediating his defenses against them. Taking in his sadness and fear, she could better understand and contain Jose's aggressive responses and thus his acting out diminished.

In our work in schools, we have tried in a small way to follow Selma Fraiberg's guidance and values to bring together “psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, and social work” within a culturally attuned perspective.