Thinking Developmentally in Child and Adult Psychoanalysis

Reeves, Justine Kalas

doi:10.1080/15289168.2018.1456129

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

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“…He was treated for approximately 2 years in 3 day-a-week child analysis with weekly sessions with either or both parents in the child analysis model of Novick and Novick (2011). The long periods of separation from the father and mother required an approach of the analyst also as a developmental object (Hurry, 2018; Kalas Reeves, 2018; Levy-Warren, 1996, 2018). Parent work focused on the parents counteracting the lonely isolation of the child through more frequent communications with him during the day and evening and setting up Zoom meetings with his extended family discussing everyday events of past history and current reality.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic in a latency child.

Abrams¹

2023

Psychoanalytic Psychology

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Article presents the online analytic treatment of Alfred, a 6½-year-old African American boy in whom the outbreak and first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a devastating posttraumatic stress disorder and chronic ongoing cumulative trauma. In contrast to concrete attacking life-threatening external objects in the case of collapsing buildings, car accidents, or rape, COVID-19 was represented by this sensitive and imaginative child as a gradually more amorphous and invisible monster that quarantined his mother away from him for 2 months, killed his great uncle, and eventually infected him with frightening asthmatic breathing. The mandated lockdown of the in-person closing of his school, after school activities, church, and neighborhood playground engendered a closed-in prison-like experience within his home, which stimulated animal phobia, agoraphobia, separation anxiety, and occasional claustrophobia. He seemed first to internally experience the COVID-19 pandemic displaced onto a fox, large dogs, and his father as an outer space alien dressed in the body suit, gloves, mask, and face shield required in his health worker military job. Then these displacements gradually changed to the more inconsistently visible bed bugs, vampires, and shape shifting monsters in his fantasies, stories, and dreams. COVID-19 turned Alfred's world from supportive childhood social relations to long periods of lonely isolation in front of his television and computer, where he was further traumatized by watching the entire video of the murder of George Floyd and the powerful metaphor of the COVID-19 pandemic in Carpenter's (1982) horror film "The Thing.

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