The Childhood of Psychoanalysis
The birth and development of the discipline of child psychoanalysis, founded in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society leading up to World War II and carried on in exile, is often regarded as a mere consequence of the inclusion of women consigned to the roles of caretakers and educators in the psychoanalytic movement. This project seeks to reevaluate and expand this appraisal, arguing instead that the discipline fundamentally developed through the analysis and care of orphaned and displaced children suffering from the effects of war. This more radical attempt to understand the role of trauma frames it not only in terms of the past of the adult subject, but in the silenced, potentially all-too-soon-to-be-forgotten present of children denied futurity in an environment of genocide.
Arielle Friend is a Ph.D. student in the German Language and Literature Program at Rutgers University (New Jersey), where she also taught from 2018 to 2022. Her research interests include psychoanalysis and trauma studies in relation to poetics, a focus which began to take form during her interdisciplinary undergraduate studies at New York University’s Gallatin School for Individualized Study. Prior to joining the Rutgers Ph.D. program she was a teaching assistant at the University College of Teacher Education Carinthia as a participant in the teaching assistant program of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education (BMB) administered by Fulbright Austria (Austrian-American Educational Commission).
Book Review: »Anneliese’s House, by Lou Andreas-Salomé, edited and translated by Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger«, in: MLN 137, Number 3, April 2022
In the psychoanalysis of infants and children, the incursion of psychic trauma is not located in a repressed and buried past, as in the analysis of adult patients, but becomes a matter of urgent contemporaneity. Given this shift of temporal focus, might the theories and praxis of child psychoanalysis be particularly attuned to the historical traumas contemporaneous to the early years of the discipline itself?