Early Parenting and Prevention of Disorder: Psychoanalytic Research at Interdisciplinary Frontiers(The Developments in Psychoanalysis Series)

This book provides insight and findings from leading psychoanalysts who are involved in early prevention research and clinical work. Advances in the sciences of early development have brought a heightened awareness to the crucial importance of early experiences for health and development as well as building strong foundations for education and preventing disorder. New approaches are applied in home visitation, working with immigrant families, and those stressed by trauma, conflicts and economic disadvantage. Examples of clinical application and the implementation of promising programs in an "outreach psychoanalysis" are also provided.

About the Author :
Robert Newcomb Emde, MD, is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, University of Colorado School of Medicine, and currently consults at the Centers for American Indian and Native Alaskan Health at the Colorado School of Public Health. As an early childhood researcher and psychoanalyst, he was a member of the US committee that wrote the guidelines for Early Head Start and was a leader in its seventeen-site national RCT that initiated that program. He is a Past President of the Society for Research in Child Development, and serves as Honorary President of the World Association for Infant Mental Health, as well as on the Board of Directors of Zero To Three: The National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber is a training analyst in the German Psychoanalytical Association, former Chair of the Research Subcommittees for Conceptual Research, and a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society. She is Vice Chair of the Research Board of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Full Professor for Psychoanalysis at the University of Kassel, and head Director of the Sigmund Freud Institute, Frankfurt/Main. Her main research fields include epistemology and methods of clinical and empirical research in psychoanalysis, interdisciplinary discourse with embodied cognitive science, educational sciences, and modern German literature.

Review :
'Few books could be more central to this series than an up-to-date review of psychoanalytically informed developmental research and intervention studies in early development, both systematic and clinical. The editors were lucky in being able to bring together some of the most committed and respected contributors to this important field. The particular perspective from which this volume emerges takes parenting as its central theme. It is an intriguing facet of modern biology that the clearer we become about the importance of genetic influences on development, the more we are forced to recognise the central role that the early years - particularly early years scaffolded by a caregiver - play in the creation of the human mind.Early Parenting Research and the Prevention of Disorder will become a classic of prevention science. It is a science with great promise, which has yet to deliver the kind of results that we know it has the potential to. Psychoanalytic understanding of infancy and early childhood has led the way to creating understanding of the human brain as necessarily developing in the context of important social relationships. These relationships - the ones between the child and the parent, as well as the ones between children - provide the material for the emergence of the human mind, which the brain has the potential to create. It is obvious, then, that influencing these relationships can serve either to optimise the achievement of this potential, or to undermine it in critical ways, leading to suboptimal outcomes. It is the aim of this book to orient us towards how we can work more effectively to minimise risk and maximise wellbeing, and the book succeeds wonderfully in achieving its aim.'- Peter Fonagy, from the Foreword