Scientific Program featuring Paul Brinich, PhD
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Rosenblitt Lecture Series presents Changing Life’s Path, One Child at a Time: The Past, Present, and Future of Child Psychoanalysis
Presented by Paul Brinich, PhD
Registration Fee: Please select the fee level that best reflects your current circumstances.
Join us for a rare bridge between generations, where today’s emerging therapists meet the elders who developed the art of child psychoanalysis.
Getting to know a child’s mind takes time. More than a century ago, a few intrepid pioneers began to apply some of Freud’s insights to their educational and therapeutic work with children. They created virtual laboratories for observing both normal and problematic development in children. Unfortunately, theoretical controversies within the field led to some Balkanization that isolated their work from related fields concerned with the growing child. Later social and economic shifts undermined support for intensive treatment while biological psychiatry promised rapid symptomatic relief. The laboratories that characterized our field in its first half century faded away.
This changed environment requires us to re-invent opportunities for doing intensive, in-person psychoanalytic work with children. A return to models of treatment and training that combine (1) educational services with (2) appropriate medical interventions and (3) in-person psychoanalytic treatment may allow child psychoanalysis to survive, particularly if the boundaries between the various fields involved in work with children become more permeable than in years past. It takes both a village and a good bit of attentive time to understand a child’s mind and to change life’s path.
About the Speaker
Paul Brinich earned a PhD in Human Development at the University of Chicago. His clinical training began at the Langley Porter Institute (UC San Francisco). He then did four years of child psychoanalytic training at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Course and Clinic (later the Anna Freud Centre) in London. He completed his adult psychoanalytic training through the UNC-Duke University Psychoanalytic Education Program (now the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas). He has served on the faculties of Departments of Psychology and/or Psychiatry at UCSF, CWRU, Duke, UNC-CH and on the teaching staff of both the PCC and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He is a past president of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis, of the North Carolina Psychoanalytic Society, and a former senior editor of the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.