Bodily Experiences and the Developing Capacity for Representation

Advanced Seminar in Child & Adolescent Analysis:

“Bodily Experiences and the Developing Capacity for Representation:

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with an Autistic Toddler and her Depressed Mother”

Thursday, December 6, 2018

8:00 pm

Presenter: Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, M.D., Ph.D.

This presentation discusses the treatment of a disturbed baby encapsulated in an autistic relationship with a severely depressed mother. This mother-baby dyad was unable to develop a communicative relationship with potentially catastrophic effects for the baby’s future mental health.

The lack of synchrony between the baby’s needs and feelings and the mother had blocked the baby’s capacity to develop an integrated self capable of sustaining the Body Ego. The young child’s long treatment demonstrates how bodily experiences and affects are present from the beginning of life as the core of the developing self and can be evaluated and interpreted by the analyst. The child’s early mental life initially creates the first representations of the self in relationship with the object. Eventually, through bodily sensations linked with emotions and memories of pleasurable moments, the baby’s capacity to integrate these representations enriches the process of symbolization.

2 CME/ CE credits offered.

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in NYC who works in private practice with adults and children, parents and their babies. A member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, she is on the faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research, where she directs the Parent-Infant Psychotherapy Training Program; she is Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at Columbia University. She is a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute, and she chairs the discussion group on Parent-Infant Programs at Psychoanalytic Institutes at the American Psychoanalytic Association meetings.

She recently published “The Process of Representation in Early Childhood,”  and “Attacks on Linking in Parents of Young Disturbed Children.” In French she has co-authored books on play in child psychotherapy and on psychoanalytic interventions with parents and babies.  She co-edited  with Vaia Tsolas in October 2017 “A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today’s Psychoanalysis.”

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:

1. identify psychodynamically-based responses to children who present autistic symptoms and developmental delay.
2. describe the multilayered dynamics present in mother-baby interactions and the consequences on mental health.
3. identify approaches to the development of a working alliance with parents in order to facilitate in-depth work with young children.