Michael O'Loughlin – författare

This volume offers very specific illustrations of psychoanalytic ways of thinking and working in both clinical and pedagogical contexts with children. It is designed for professionals who work with infants, children, and adolescents, and who are seeking modes of working that respects emotions, that embrace context, and that privilege imagination and possibility. For professionals who already practice in ways that are sympathetic to these modes of working, the scholarly underpinning of this work offers a rationale for taking a stand in favor of emotionally focused, child-centered work and in opposition to systems that negate the lives of children. This book is for caring professionals who devote their lives to creating spaces for children to find their own paths and is intended to serve as a source of sustenance and support for such work.

With 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 conceptualized instrumentally; and children with complex psychological symptoms are delimited, depersonalized, or simply removed. Professionals who work with children psychodynamically draw on diverse frameworks including the work of Anna Freud, the long tradition of the Tavistock Clinic in London [e.g., Anne Alvarez, Susan Reid, Margaret Rustin, Frances Tustin, etc.], the writings of Klein, Winnicott, and their colleagues, French analysts [e.g., Piera Aulagnier, Didier Anzieu, Laurent Danon-Boileau, Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, and Catherine Mathelin] and Italian infant/child analyst Alessandro Piontelli. This work is valuable but often inaccessible to school professionals because the writing is somewhat specialized, and because there is no tradition of teaching such work in professional preparation in those fields. This collection is theoretically grounded in that the authors share a commitment to valuing children’s emotions and understand the usefulness of psychoanalytic approaches for enhancing children’s lives. It is laden with examples to invite into this discussion those students and professionals who value these ideas but for whom this book may be their first introduction to progressive educational ideals and psychodynamic ways of working with children. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools provides an introductory volume to open the door to the possibility of introducing psychodynamic frameworks to education and human service professors and school professionals and professionals working with children.

The Subject of Childhood is a collection of essays on early childhood education/childhood studies that brings critical psychological, psychoanalytic, and cultural studies perspectives to bear on understanding the lives children live. Central concerns running through these essays are the emergence of subjectivity in the child; the complexity of conceptualizing the relationship between external cultural and social forces; and the internal sense of agency that we know that each child possesses. Together, the volume is a blending of interdisciplinary theoretical writing, personal autobiographical inquiry, and concrete examples from the author’s work with teachers in schools and from his clinical practice as a child psychoanalyst. Written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and professionals across the English-speaking world in early childhood education, childhood education, educational foundations, and cultural studies in education, this book functions as a core text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in child development, child psychology, sociology of education, childhood studies, and early childhood education.

The Subject of Childhood is a collection of essays on early childhood education/childhood studies that brings critical psychological, psychoanalytic, and cultural studies perspectives to bear on understanding the lives children live. Central concerns running through these essays are the emergence of subjectivity in the child; the complexity of conceptualizing the relationship between external cultural and social forces; and the internal sense of agency that we know that each child possesses. Together, the volume is a blending of interdisciplinary theoretical writing, personal autobiographical inquiry, and concrete examples from the author’s work with teachers in schools and from his clinical practice as a child psychoanalyst. Written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and professionals across the English-speaking world in early childhood education, childhood education, educational foundations, and cultural studies in education, this book functions as a core text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in child development, child psychology, sociology of education, childhood studies, and early childhood education.

Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering: Trauma, History, and Memory offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives that highlight the problem of traumatic memory. Because trauma fragments memory, storytelling is impeded by what is unknowable and what is unspeakable. Each of the contributors tackles the problem of narrativizing memory that is constructed from fragments that have been passed along the generations. When trauma is cultural as well as personal, it becomes even more invisible, as each generation’s attempts at coping push the pain further below the surface. Consequently, that pain becomes increasingly ineffable, haunting succeeding generations. In each story the contributors offer, there emerges the theme of difference, a difference that turns back on itself and makes an accusation. Themes of knowing and unknowing show the terrible toll that trauma takes when there is no one with whom the trauma can be acknowledged and worked through. In the face of utter lack of recognition, what might be known together becomes hidden. Our failure to speak to these unaspirated truths becomes a betrayal of self and also of others. In the case of intergenerational and cultural trauma, we betray not only our ancestors but also the future generations to come. In the face of unacknowledged trauma, this book reveals that we are confronted with the perennial choice of speaking or becoming complicit in our silence.

The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting: Essays on Trauma, History, and Memory brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines that draw on multiple perspectives to address issues that arise at the intersection of trauma, history, and memory. Contributors include critical theorists, critical historians, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and a working artist. The authors use intergenerational trauma theory while also pushing and pulling at the edges of conventional understandings of how trauma is defined. This book respects the importance of the recuperation of memory and the creation of interstitial spaces where trauma might be voiced. The writers are consistent in showing a deep respect for the sociohistorical context of subjective formation and the political importance of recuperating dangerous memory—the kind of memory that some authorities go to great lengths to erase. The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting is of interest to critical historians, critical social theorists, psychotherapists, psychosocial theorists, and to those exploring the possibilities of life as the practice of freedom.

With 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 conceptualized instrumentally; and children with complex psychological symptoms are delimited, depersonalized, or simply removed. Professionals who work with children psychodynamically draw on diverse frameworks including the work of Anna Freud, the long tradition of the Tavistock Clinic in London [e.g., Anne Alvarez, Susan Reid, Margaret Rustin, Frances Tustin, etc.], the writings of Klein, Winnicott, and their colleagues, French analysts [e.g., Piera Aulagnier, Didier Anzieu, Laurent Danon-Boileau, Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, and Catherine Mathelin] and Italian infant/child analyst Alessandro Piontelli. This work is valuable but often inaccessible to school professionals because the writing is somewhat specialized, and because there is no tradition of teaching such work in professional preparation in those fields. This collection is theoretically grounded in that the authors share a commitment to valuing children’s emotions and understand the usefulness of psychoanalytic approaches for enhancing children’s lives. It is laden with examples to invite into this discussion those students and professionals who value these ideas but for whom this book may be their first introduction to progressive educational ideals and psychodynamic ways of working with children. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools provides an introductory volume to open the door to the possibility of introducing psychodynamic frameworks to education and human service professors and school professionals and professionals working with children.

Lives Interrupted: Psychiatric Narratives of Struggle and Resilience provides insight into the everyday experiences of individuals struggling with severe psychic distress during a six-month immersion program at the Fountain House headquarters, a New York-based organization that works to address the effects of serious mental illness. These narratives add complexity and objectivity to the expanding discussion of psychiatric treatment plans. Contributors to this collection argue that narratives are vital to treatment and should not be treated as secondary options to standard diagnosis and treatment practices that rely heavily on pharmaceuticals and often result in short-term revolving-door interventions for complex forms of human suffering.

This book locates internally focused, critical perspectives regarding the social, political, emotional, and mental growth of children. Through the radical openness afforded by psychoanalytic and related frameworks, this volume illuminates, promotes, and helps situate subjectivities that are often blotted out for both the child and society. The overall emphasis is on motifs of lostness and foundness, in terms of the geographies of the psycho-social, and how such motifs govern and regulate what have come to count as the normative indexes of childhood as well as how they exclude other real childhoods.

Michael O’Loughlin was seven years old when the Irish trade union movement replaced its headquarters, Liberty Hall – the starting point of the 1916 Rising – with Ireland’s first skyscraper. This bold, seventeen-storey Liberty Hall expressed an aspiration towards the modernity which its builders envisaged as the birthright of future generations. Since then, as one of Dublin’s most iconic buildings, Liberty Hall has cast a personal and political light on the lives of citizens passing below, and formed the backdrop to O’Loughlin’s earliest childhood memories.In this remarkable new book – a highly original fusion of poetry, visual images and prose memoirs – Liberty Hall becomes both a real and imaginary space, a physical building and a state of mind in which to be free; a place where the boundaries between verbal and visual, poetry and prose, past and present, city and suburb, local and global, all become fluid. It is a book of numerous journeys: the ritualised crossing of the Liffey from North to South and back again; travels around European cities; and into O’Loughlin’s own family history in the first difficult century of the Irish state. He explores the emotional weather through memory, cinema and architecture, arriving in the end at Liberty Hall.