Biography
Bernard Roberts is a Child analyst and a Training and Supervising Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society where he is currently Head of the Child and Adolescent Clinic. He has recently retired from the NHS where he has been a Medical Director and Head Psychotherapist.
Synopsis
The clinical material in this lecture illustrates how the object relations in the inner world of a little girl brought up in physical and emotional neglect and abuse could be understood through the use of her own and her analyst’s body. The child behaved like a dog when she entered infant school. She could not learn and disrupted the education of others. At the beginning of a four-year analysis the child could not play. The author brings some theoretical concepts that helped him explore the meaning of pretence, how being able to replace real objects by pretend ones is essential for play, and how the nature of the primary object can cause the child to become confused about truth and falsehood. The paper describes the interplay between psychoanalytical interpretations and thoughtful Social Care interventions and the need for both.
Reading Material
Required:
Winnicott, D.W. (1960) Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self, 1960, in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment, London: Hogarth Press 1965
Winnicott, D.W. (1956) Primary Maternal Preoccupation. In Through Paediatrics To Psychoanalysis, Collected Papers, London:Tavistock Press
Additional:
Bion, W.R.(1970) Lies and The Thinker. In Attention and Interpretation, a Psychoanalytic Approach to Insight in Psychoanalysis and Groups (pp. 97-105). London: Tavistock Press.
Deutsch, H. (1982). On The Pathological Lie (Pseudologia Phantastica), Journal of The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry. 10, 369-386
Freud, S. (1913) Two Lies Told by Children. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume XII, (pp. 303-310)
Freud, S. (1909). Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (The Rat Man). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume X (pp. 151-249).
O’Shaughnessy, E. (1990). Can a Liar be Psychoanalysed? International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 71, 187-195