Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis in Times of Crisis

Kristin Fiorella, Psy.D., MFT, MFA, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in San Francisco. She is on the faculties of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.

‘Written for tumultuous times, this volume offers fresh and valuable psychoanalytic reflections on traumatized children’s play and on how wars/climate change/pandemics inflect psychic development. Breaking with psychoanalysis’s omertà around naming the genocide of Palestinian children and trans youth, Fiorella’s bold and erudite collection tracks fantasies about blown-off limbs growing back, impending disablements by climate change/pandemics, and trans children’s anxieties about being erased. It also necessarily reveals how adults fail children, children wounded not only by bombs, disease, and rising temperatures, but also by adults’ lies, greed, narcissism, and inaction. Never has Winnicott’s “there’s no such thing as a baby” been such a searing indictment.’Avgi Saketopoulou, Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York, USA. ‘This is a powerful and precious book. The contributors have gone undaunted into the darkest of places and seen some terrible sights. Someone had to do it and thanks to these brave psychoanalysts, now someone has. They have much to teach us.’Anne Alvarez, Consultant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, London, UK. ‘It is an essential task for psychoanalysis to contemplate the precarity of human existence in a world under threat of extinction, a pandemic, and endless wars. The social-political circumstances of our lives are as fundamental to who we are as the dynamics of our families of origins, doubly so when they are traumatic. This book explores the condition of the most vulnerable humans: children. It is written by people who have been meeting them in some of the most devastating trauma zones. It is a gift, and a demand that we pay close attention and do what we can.’Eyal Rozmarin, psychoanalyst, New York, USA.

• ForewordKristin FiorellaPart One: WarIntroductionKristin FiorellaChapter One: War, Trauma and the Survival of Hope in Palestine: What We Learn from its ChildrenSamah Jabr and Elizabeth BergerChapter Two: Pour a Libation for Us: Restoring the Sense of a Moral Universe to Children Affected by ViolenceMartha BraginChapter Three: Psychoanalytic Thoughts on Evacuated Parents and Children during the First Weeks of the October 7th WarRuth WeinbergChapter Four: Minds in the Line of Fire: Mothers During the WarKateryna Abashkina, Kateryna Alpatova,Tetiana Stasiuk, Anastasya Svinarchuk, and Emanuela Quagliata Chapter Five: Children in a World at WarMonica CardenalChapter Six: There’s a Hole in Daddy’s Arm: Making Contact with Opiod Epidemic in Clinical PracticeBen FifeChapter Seven: Forbidden Games: Anti War Manifesto:Ana Belchior MeliciasChapter Eight: Totalitarian Regimes and a Child’s Mind: Cria CuervosMary Brady, Ana Belchior Melicias, Virginia Unger, and Adriana PrenglerChapter Nine: The Need for Truth in Healthy Psychic DevelopmentAntonia GrimaltPart Two: PandemicIntroductionKristin FiorellaChapter Ten: Other Lullabies: Attacks on Blackness, Confusion of Tongues, and the Loss of PlayCarlos PadronChapter Eleven: Caring for Cryptnids: Welcoming the More-Than-Human into Psychoanalytic TreatmentKathleen Del Mar Miller Chapter Twelve: Adolescents in the Line of Fire: Between Chaos, Ideals, and Psychic Reality Today in the Adolescent Subjectivation ProcessFernando GomezChapter Thirteen: S.O.S. BrasilAlicia Beatriz Dorado de LisondoChapter Fourteen: On Psychic Envelopes and Spaces for Young Children during the PandemicChristine Anzieu-PremmereurPart Three: Climate ChangeIntroductionKristin FiorellaChapter Fifteen: Eco-Anxiety in Children and Young People- A Rational Response, Irreconciliable Despair, or Both?Caroline HickmanChapter Sixteen:The Climate Crisis and the “Unnatural” Body: Onto-epistemological Possibilities and Threats of the Genders of Children and AdolescentsKristin FiorellaChapter Seventeen: Climate Anxiety, Maturational Loss, and Adversarial GrowthPanu PihkalaChapter Eighteen: Dwelling and the Climate Crisis: A Developmental Perspective and its ImplicationsRyan LamotheChapter Nineteen: The Climate Crisis: The Impact of Fragile Identificatory Models on AdolescenceChristine Franckx