Description
Book SynopsisWith the push toward accountability and test performance in schools there has been a decline in emphasis on creativity, imagination, and feelings in schools. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools is designed for students and professionals who are interested in restoring such values to their work with children.There is an absence of psychoanalytic ways of thinking in conventional professional discourses of schooling. With a few notable exceptions, the discourses of child development, classroom management, early childhood education, special education, school psychology, and school counseling have constructed notions of children and schooling that are often behaviorist, instrumental, and symptom-focused. Curriculum too often focuses on acquisition of knowledge and behaviors; discipline is conceptualized as compliance, and symptoms such as anger, school resistance, etc., are pathologized and reacted to out of context; children's special needs are often
Trade ReviewLombardi includes a truly lovely description of a school program, organized by a philosophy professor, that recognizes small children as the philosophers they can be. ... Many clinicians will find this book enriching. For psychoanalysts, who believe that we have knowledge and skills with wide applications to the most entrenched social problems, this book will be both an inspiration and a guide to creative thinking about education. * Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association *
Michael O'Loughlin is one of the wisest persons I know. He is brilliant and this book will enlighten many people. It is highly readable and it delivers a number of profound findings. I highly recommend it to lay readers and professionals. Students will find it highly informative and easy to read. -- Conrad P. Pritscher Ph.D, Bowling Green State University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Foreword, Daniel B. Frank Introduction, Michael O’Loughlin Chapter 1: Interdisciplinary Psychoanalysis and the Education of Children, Jonathan Cohen Chapter 2: The Child, Childhood, and School, Patrick Lewis Chapter 3: Subjection and Subjectivity: The Child and A Mind of One’s Own, Karen Lombardi Chapter 4: Françoise Dolto: Someone to Watch over Me, Derek Bunyard Chapter 5: Ghostly presences in children’s lives, Michael O’Loughlin Chapter 6: The Family Unconscious, Karen Lupe Chapter 7: Working at the Interface of Education and Trauma in an Indigenous Pre-school: The Importance of “Deep Soul Listening”, Norma Tracey Chapter 8: Self-Containment Versus Fragmentation: Helping Parents Understand Their Child’s Language of Play, Donna Wolf-Palacio Chapter 9: The Hidden Allies: Parents as Collaborators, Carola Chase Chapter 10: Even when things go well they are difficult: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Relationship between School and Family, Ana Archangelo & Fabio Camargo Bandeira Villela Chapter 11: Integrative Role of Psychodynamic Principles in an Interdisciplinary Elementary School, Leon Hoffman, Carol Catapano, Katy Meyer Chapter 12: Reviving Schools as ‘Great Good Places’, Robbie Lloyd Chapter 13: Not Confronting the Resistances in a Psychoanalytically Guided School, Howard Covitz Chapter 14: Psychoanalytic understandings of classroom life and learning, Devin Thornburg Chapter 15: A vision of the Psychodynamically Informed School (PIS), Al Galves Chapter 16: Progressive Education and Psychoanalysis: Toward a Theory of the Subjective Experience of School Life, Daniel B. Frank Index About the Contributors
