The Child, Adolescent and Parent Psychotherapy Committee has organized a December webinar entitled “Relational Child Therapy and the Intergenerational Transmission of Traumatic Experience.” This webinar is led by Laurel Silber, PsyD (USA), features discussants Fabia Banella, PhD (Italy) and Macarena Lopez Magnasco, Dipl. Psych. (Chile), and is moderated by Esther Bamberger, PhD (Israel).

The work of Selma Fraiberg and her colleagues, “Ghosts in the Nursery” (1975), claimed a central role for parental subjectivity in child work. For Fraiberg, ghosts refer to unformulated or dissociated experiences related to a parent’s past trauma that affect a child. Over the course of development, the effects of these ghosts move beyond the nursery. The webinar focuses on the clinical process for the child therapist navigating this complex terrain in the parent-child relationship, utilizing Silber’s 2012 articles, “Ghostbusting Transgenerational Processes” and its companion piece, “Ghostbusting Discussion.”

The 75-participant webinar addresses the clinical challenges suggested by Fraiberg by considering how relational clinical work incorporates non-linear dynamic systems thinking and attachment theory into the psychoanalytic frame. Cases examples are discussed to illustrate the multiple dimensions of simultaneously working with children and their parents.