Dates: March 10 – March 30, 2015
Title: Intergenerational Attachment Patterns and the Responses of Child Therapists in the Presence of Societal Trauma
Faculty: Martha Bragin, Esther Cohen, Katherine Frost, Judy Roth, Stuart Twemlow
Moderator: Ann Marie Sacramone
About this seminar: Web Seminar offered by IARPP Child and Adolescent Committee
In the seminar, we will explore a link between intergenerational attachment patterns in the presence of societal trauma and responsive action by child therapists in the therapeutic dyad and the wider social context. Our readings will focus on the narratives concerning therapists, mothers and children written by Davoine and Gaudilliere, Roth, Cohen, Frost and Twemlow regarding experience and therapy in the presence of societal trauma. We hope to explore the following questions:
What is the effect of war and other societal traumas on intergenerational attachment patterns? On the child therapist and therapy? When is a clinical response also an activist response? Do we need to go beyond our offices? Why and how? What happens when we do or don’t?
Relational child therapists focus on the concentric fields and systems of interaction in which the child’s development is contingent: family, neighborhood, school, and culture. We hope that this seminar helps us to deepen, enrich, and elaborate our roles within each of these systems. Beyond working within the immediate relational context of the children and their attachment figures, relational child therapists advocate on behalf of the child. We wonder if the idea of activism in the presence of societal trauma is included in our current ideas of therapeutic process and advocacy.
The IARPP Child and Adolescent Committee thanks the following IARPP members for their contributions to the design of this web seminar;
Roy Aldor (Israel), Esther Bamberger (Israel), Marco Bernabei (Italy), Doris Brothers (USA), Jacqueline Gotthold (USA), Robin Grace (USA), Grete Laine (USA), Sebastián León (Chile), Laurel Silber (USA) , Gerard Weber (Australia).
Bios: This web seminar brings together faculty that has worked with children and families in the presence of societal trauma all over the world. Martha Bragin, the 2011 recipient of the Hayman Prize for a published paper on traumatized children and adults, is a member of United Nations Office of the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) Inter Agency Reference Group on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings and has worked with survivors of violence and disaster in 37 countries, including child soldiers in Uganda, Tsunami survivors in Tamal Nadu, and social workers in Afghanistan. Esther Cohen has worked with children and therapists after wars and terrorist attacks in Israel and published extensively on the subject of trauma. Katherine Frost is the director of the Baby Mat Project, which addresses intergenerational trauma through a fusion of psychoanalytic and cultural interventions with mothers and infants in South Africa. Judy Roth, co-chair of Global Psychosocial Network, has focused on the impact or war on mothers and on providing psychological support to psychosocial and humanitarian workers in the Middle East. She works on how to see, amplify, and responsibly disseminate painful psychological realities of children and families living with political violence and continuous trauma. Stuart Twemlow, the editor of the Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, has developed programs to reduce violence in communities in Jamaica, Austrailia, Hungary, and the USA, and published extensively on the topic. In 2012 he received the Mary Sigourney Award for outstanding contributions to Psychoanalysis
The seminar will be moderated by Ann Marie Sacramone, who has developed models for working with traumatized children using a psychoanalytic integrated community approach.
