Selected Papers of Margaret Lowenfeld - Hardcover

Urwin, Cathy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184519084X ISBN 13: 9781845190842

Verlag: Sussex Academic Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

"Throughout her long and innovative life, Margaret Lowenfeld emphasized the development of new forms of communication with children, especially devoting herself to the diagnosis of troubled children. By understanding and using the tools she developed, we can experience, and so partake of, her insights." From the Introduction by Margaret Mead, world renowned anthropologist and author of Coming of Age in Samoa, to Margaret Lowenfeld's Understanding Children's Sandplay

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Margaret Lowenfeld was a pediatrician who became a pioneer of child psychology and psychotherapy who developed several educational techniques that are still widely used today. Cathy Urwin was an acclaimed child psychotherapist and developmental psychologist. John Hood-Williams was a student of Margaret Lowenfeld and the author of several books, including Beyond Sex and Gender.

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Child Psychotherapy, War and the Normal Child

By Margaret Lowenfeld, Cathy Urwin, John Hood-Williams

Sussex Academic Press

Copyright © 2014 The Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld Trust
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84519-084-2

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Part One Margaret Lowenfeld by Cathy Urwin, 
1 Introduction, 
2 Growing up through Culture, 
3 The Foundation of the Children's Clinic, 1927-31, 
4 Inauguration and Development of the Institute of Child Psychology, 1931-9, 
5 Impact and Aftermath of the Second World War, 
6 Retrospective, 
Editors' Note, 
Part Two Selected Papers, 
7 The Background in Research, 
8 From Medicine to Child Psychology, 
9 The Need for a New Method in the Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children, 
10 Theoretical Concepts Developed, 
11 Questions of Therapeutic Technique, 
12 Later Concerns, 
Note on the Dr Margaret Lowenfeld Trust, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Given their concern with the history of individuals, the practices of child psychotherapy and related disciplines have paid remarkably little attention to their own history. Within psychoanalysis, of course, there is a strong tradition of returning to Freud in introducing theoretical and technical innovations. But the focus on internal forms of historical inquiry, or on what John Forrester (1986) has described as 'psychoanalytic' histories, has been at the expense of asking what may be prior questions: How was a place produced or carved out for recognizing and treating emotional problems in childhood? How did the social context influence the development of theory and technique? How, too, has the study of emotional dynamics associated with the therapeutic professions become so sharply divided from the so-called normal development studied by academic developmental psychologists?

These questions have become particularly pertinent over the last decade. Within academic developmental psychology, child psychotherapy and psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and allied disciplines, there is a growing interest in intellectual roots and the conditions of their production. Several factors have contributed to this interest. One may be related to a general preoccupation with history and heritage, reflected in films, literature, television and other aspects of popular culture at the present time; this appears to be associated with the marked social, economic and political upheavals of the last ten years (Raphael Samuel, 1987). Another factor may be put down to the age of the traditions of psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry. Within psychoanalysis, for example, sufficient time has elapsed to allow for the publication of new biographies, such as Phyllis Gross -kurth's (1986) work on Melanie Klein, new accounts of influences on Sigmund Freud, such as Frank Sulloway's (1979) Freud, Biologist of the Mind, and re-examinations of old controversies, such as Jeffrey Masson's (1985) equally controversial account of Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory (Freud, 1896). Together these works broaden the basis for understanding the evolution of psychoanalysis to include not only the personalities of individual pioneers but also the social and political context of the times, and the effects of rivalries between different disciplines and professional groups.

Where children are the central focus, the evolution of the very idea of what a child is has itself demanded historical investigation. From the extreme form of the thesis that childhood is a social invention, particularly associated with Philippe Ariès's (1962) Centuries of Childhood, there has been a widespread acceptance of the idea that childhood itself is a concept with a history. That is, what children are taken to be varies between cultures and across historical epochs (Hoyles, 1979; Pollack, 1983). Within complex Western societies, specialized knowledges on child development have played a particularly important role in producing generally shared assumptions about children's emotional, physical and intellectual needs and notions of normal development. Recent analyses of particular social practices suggest that these effects are achieved through the intimate relation between the production of specialized knowledges and the ways in which institutions associated with such professions as social work, psychiatry, and education function in social regulation and the management of deviance (Donzelot, 1979; Foucault, 1977; Ingleby, 1986; Rose, 1985; Urwin, 1985a; Walkerdine, 1984).

A fourth factor promoting interest in history is more obviously related to the current political and economic climate. Restrictions in available resources and cuts in public expenditure have direct effects on professionals involved in such child-centred professions as child health, education and social work. These professionals include child psychotherapists working in the public sector who may be called upon to justify their existence. Paradoxically, economic restrictions are occurring just as developmental psychology may be beginning to recognize a lack of adequate tools for conceptualizing the contribution of emotional processes to cognitive development and symbolic functioning, raising questions about whether research psychologists can engage productively with, for example, the theory and practice of psychoanalysis (Boston, 1975, 1987; Stern, 1985; Sylvester Bradley, 1988; Urwin, 1986). The relative reduction in or pressure on existing resources is also occurring in spite of the apparently overwhelming evidence indicating persistent if not increasing emotional problems in children and young people. This is illustrated, for example, in the media coverage given to child abuse, drug dependency, depression and violence inflicted on the self or others.

As Dilys Daws (1987) has pointed out, the profession of child psychotherapy has always been a relatively small one and, perhaps because of this, it has probably always regarded itself as under threat. But whether or not the profession could or should make claims about understanding or ameliorating such manifestations of emotional turmoil cannot be answered by referring to what goes on in the consulting room between child and therapist, or even to what constitutes relief or cure in any absolute or timeless way. If it is recognized that what counts as a problem, or the forms in which emotional problems manifest themselves, vary historically and socially, then it becomes imperative to ask not only what the relation is between socially defined manifestations of unhappiness or maladaptation and the inner world of the child, but also, what role is played by the psychotherapeutic tradition in the social construction of norms of normality and pathology, either independently or through its relation to other agencies, such as medicine, education, social work and the law.

In examining how and why child psychotherapy became possible, the period between the two world wars stands out as particularly significant. At that time a number of social and administrative changes associated with the post-war reconstruction brought the twentieth-century child into the centre of the stage. These changes included developments in medicine and welfare provision aimed at infants, young children and their mothers. Concern over high infant-mortality rate and the health of children had, in fact, become marked at the turn of the century when the poor state of health amongst a large proportion of the population had been demonstrated through the large number of potential recruits who had to be turned down for...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sussex Academic Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 184519084X
• ISBN 13: 9781845190842
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 408
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland