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E Young-Bruehl

Publications and source records attributed to E Young-Bruehl.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

The wise baby as the voice of the true self.

Sandor Ferenczi wrote about a typical dream of the "Wise Baby" and later used this figure to represent the child who is traumatized into precocious wisdom, who becomes "the family psychiatrist." We discuss Ferenczi's theory of traumatization and the "split self," noting how it was taken up in D. W. Winnicott's "True Self/False Self" conceptualization. We then present three patients' wise baby dreams to show how these trauma theories can be used in dream interpretation and how dream interpretation can support them.

Adult↗

Anna Freud as a historian of psychoanalysis.

This article explores a series of papers Anna Freud wrote in the 1970s, which constitute her history of child psychoanalysis. It notes her purposes-theoretical, clinical, and institutional-for reviewing this history and then focuses on three themes that she stressed. First, she emphasized that the "widening scope of psychoanalysis" had been both tremendously fruitful and perplexing as it revealed areas-such as the developmental pathologies-for which theory and technique lag. Second, she underscored the way child analysis had been extended from pathology to the theory of normal development, particularly by adding child observation to its research methods. Third, she noted how child analysis has often been hampered by reductionist thinking, and she made a plea for complexity: for considering all metapsychological frameworks and all developmental lines, and for articulating a complexly grounded diagnostic.

Child↗