Psychoanalytic Reflections On Parenting Teens And Young Adults

Psychoanalytic Reflections on Parenting Teens and Young Adults explores the rich, multi-layered parent-child interactions that unfold during the period of separation and launching. While this is a necessary transitional time, parents inevitably experience feelings of loss and longing for the past as well as hope for the future. With honesty, humor, and originality, the book brings together the voices of psychoanalysts, speaking frankly, and not just as professionals, but also as parents grappling with raising young adults in today’s fast-paced world. The contributors reflect on the joys, regrets, and surprises as well as the challenges and triumphs they experience as their children reach the threshold of young adulthood. They address a wide range of topics relevant to parents and practitioners alike-indeed to all those who are closely involved with the growth and maturation of today’s youth. Offering both a broad perspective and an intimate look at present-day parenting dilemmas, the chapters focus on five main areas of interest: raising youth in the digital age, developmental difficulties, evolving gender norms, social concerns and, finally, the building of resiliency. Psychoanalytic Reflections on Parenting Teens and Young Adults offers an alternative lens to consider the complex challenges parents face in raising today’s teens and young adults, replacing the customary notion of "failure to launch" with the concept of "holding on with open arms." The explorations in this book advance the idea that in the end, these struggles are essential for growth, buoyancy and wisdom. It will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as family therapists.

Puberty is a time of tumultuous transition from childhood to adulthood activated by rapid physical changes, hormonal development and explosive activity of neurons. This book explores puberty through the parent-teenager relationship, as a "normal state of crisis", lasting several years and with the teenager oscillating between childlike tendencies and their desire to become an adult. The more parents succeed in recognizing and experiencing these new challenges as an integral, ineluctable emotional transformative process, the more they can allow their children to become independent. In addition, parents who can also see this crisis as a chance for their own further development will be ultimately enriched by this painful process. They can face up to their own aging as they take leave of youth with its myriad possibilities, accepting and working through a newfound rivalry with their sexually mature children, thus experiencing a process of maturity, which in turn can set an example for their children. This book is based on rich clinical observations from international settings, unique within the field, and there is an emphasis placed by the author on the role of the body in self-awareness, identity crises and gender construction. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, parents and carers, as well as all those interacting with adolescents in self, family and society.

This book is a timely and relevant book for psychotherapists and psychoanalysts who process loss both in their own lives and in the lives of their patients, offering perspectives from a range of theoretical backgrounds, clinical vignettes and personal insights. This volume addresses the scope of grief and mourning between the therapeutic dyad, and carefully examines how the patient and therapist experience intersect and imbue the analytic space and the therapeutic process. The book examines personal loss of parents and partners, as well as loss generated by mass trauma through the lens of the Holocaust, the immigrant experience, the COVID-19 pandemic and the environment. There are chapters that cover how the lost other continues to live within one’s mind, and within the analytic relationship, how loss impacts one’s internal self system, and how loss associated with traumatic experience with the deceased continues to reverberate. With a unique focus on the therapist’s personal experience of loss, and how it shapes the clinical situation, as well as a broad range of perspectives on managing and working with loss in patients, this is an invaluable book for all practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Silent Virtues addresses six areas of mental functioning namely patience, curiosity, privacy, intimacy, humility, and dignity. Each of the areas is elucidated with the help of clinical, literary, and cultural material. The book introduces a series of novel ideas, including: (i) the distinction between patience as a component of the therapeutic attitude and the exercise of patience as a specific technical intervention; (ii) the description of the five psychopathological syndromes involving curiosity: excessive, deficient, uneven, anachronistic, instinctualized, and false curiosity; (iii) the description of four psychopathological syndromes (failed, florid, fluctuating, and false) involving intimacy; (iv) the discourse on the importance of humility in selecting patients and in deciding upon the longevity of our professional careers; and (v) the description of three forms of dignity (metaphysical, existential, and characterological) and the various ways in which they affect psychoanalytic technique.

This book presents groundbreaking strategies for psychotherapy with today's teens, for whom high-risk behavior, lack of adult guidance, and intense anxiety and stress increasingly come with the territory. Ron Taffel addresses the key challenge of building a therapeutic relationship that is strong enough to promote real behavioral and emotional change. He demonstrates effective ways to give advice that teens will listen to, get them to tell the truth about their lives, help parents reestablish their authority, and extend the reach of therapy by such nontraditional means as inviting teens to bring friends into sessions.

Basing their work on the idea that psychoanalytic therapy and technique require more rather than less from the therapist, the Novicks explore the crucial role of parents' work in child and adolescent treatment. They show that child and adolescent therapies have two goals_resto...

Originally published in 1992 this was a much-needed book that shows how important it is to establish a therapeutic alliance with the parents of severely disturbed young people in order to improve the success of counseling with them. It also explores methods of how to ease the difficulties encountered in establishing such a relationship with the parents or guardians. In this title, the insights of psychoanalysis are used to understand reactions to parents and to develop an empathic approach to them through a new theoretical framework. Although in the popular view, a psychoanalytic approach is considered to be opposed to parents, this volume is testimony to the unique contribution such an approach can make to the support of parents and, thereby, their children. A major and unique emphasis of Severely Disturbed Youngsters is placed on exploring the feelings, reactions, and sensitivities of the therapist that can interfere with this important aspect of treatment. The thrust of the book is to put the understanding of this interference in a theoretical context and to indicate ways of coping with the interference.

Living with teenagers can be more stressful and emotional than anything parents have previously experienced. While there are dozens of books on development in young children, books on adolescent development and how to cope are almost non-existent. Kate Figes redresses the balance. Based on the advice of experts and interviews with parents and their children, this informed and practical analysis of the difficulties young people face growing up today will be essential reading for any parent.