BASIC ASSUMPTIONS AND FACTS:

- Importance of early real life events and experiences.

- Attachment system and attachment behaviour.
- Inborn or acquired?
- A biological theory:
- Cybernetic, control system, evolution, ethology, information
processing, developmental pathways.
-Genetics/Epigenetics.

-environment .

-neurobiology/memory/ narratives

-emotion regulation: self-regulation Vs co-regulation.

- Sensitivity
- Attachment styles
- Evolution of emotions: separation anxiety, mourning, anger, sadness, guilt,
shame, joy, jealousy.
- Defenses(control system): shutting off, detachment, numbing, redirection.
- Internal working models.
- Inheritance.
- From cardle to grave.
LECTURE 5: VIOLENCE IN THE FAMILY:
- Why violence as a causal factor in psychiatry have been
neglected by clinicians?
- Conceptual framework:
- Functional and non functional anger- maintaining long term
relationships.
- The myth of “death instinct”
- The problem with “infantile” “regressive” descriptions of
attachment behaviors.
.
- Mothers’ own childhood
- -Redirection- parentification.
- Establishment and persistance of behavioral patterns.
- Phenotypes of children social hehaviours:
- Approach – Avoidance- Approach avoidance- Aggression.

- Violence of men towards women partners:

- Jealousy of a child( Marsden and Owens)
- Family of origin of each.
- Coercion to maintain endangered relationship.
1- imprisonment.
2- threatening of throwing out in the street.
3-battering.

- prevention
LECTURE 6: ON KNOWING WHAT YOU ARE NOT
SUPPOSED TO KNOW AND FEELING WHAT YOU
ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO FEEL:

“Adverse experiences with parents during childhood play large part

in causing cognitive disturbance”
Amnesia/ shutting memories off
Which? How? Why?
THREE REASONS WHY:

1-parents wish not to know.

2-children treated in unbearable ways to think about.

3-unbearable feelings of guilt and shame.

- Suicide of one parent.
- Sexual activities.
- Death of a parent.
- Parentification.
- Depressed/traumatized parent.
- Threats to abandon

- Avoiding the scene experiment

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
- Multiple personality disorder.
- Paranoia and physical violence.
- -
LECTURE 7: THE ROLE OF ATTACHMENT IN
PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT
- The primacy of intimate emotional bonds.
- Types of emotional bonds.
- Comfort and support versus exploration.
- Attachment behavior in early months of development.
- Why do patterns of attachment persist?
- Theory of internalization
- Styles of communication/ Degree of freedom
-
“Whatever she fails to recognize in him he is likely to fail to
recognize in himself. In this way it is postulated, major parts of a
child’s developing personality, can becomes split off from, that is
out of communication with, those parts of his personality that his
mother recognizes and responds to, which in some cases include
features of personality that she is attributing to him wrongly.”
- Variations in a mother’s way of recalling her childhood
experience.
- Pathways to personality development.
LECTURE 8: ATTACHMENT, COMMUNICATION
AND THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS:
Five therapeutic tasks:

1- provide a secure base

2-Explore current relations
3-Examine the therapeutic relationships
4-Examine the relatedness to childhood and adolescence
experiences.
5-Enable patient to recognize his/her own internal working models
Influence of the earlier experiences on the transference relationship
Here and now focus
Holding environment
Containment
SOME PATHOGENIC SITUATIONS AND EVENTS OF CHILDHOOD

Threats not to love a child as a means of control.

Threats to abandon a child.
Threats to commit suicide.
Disclaimers and disconfirmations
Being unwanted or of unwanted sex
Scapegoating
Guilt inducing
Biological father other than the putative father
Identifying a child with another family member
THE THERAPIST STANCE:

Modest and tentative

Providing comfort and protection
Emotional communications and the restructuring of the working models:
“ A girl of sixteen who avoided touching or holding her baby(who screamed hopelessly),
insisted: ’But what is the use of talking? I always kept the things to myself. I want to
forget. I do not want to think.’
This was the point at which the therapist intervened- by herself expressing all the feelings
that any and every child would be expected to have in the situations described: How
frightened, how angry, how hopeless one would feel, and also how one would long to
go to someone who would understand and provide comfort and protection. In doing so
the therapist not only showed an understanding of how the patient must have felt, but
communicated in her manner that the expression of such feeling and desire would be
met with a sympathetic and comforting response. Only then was it possible for the
young mother t express all the grief, the tears and the unspeakable anguish for herself
as a cast off child that she had always felt but had never dared express.
LECTURE 9: DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHIATRY
COMES OF AGE
Emotionally mediated bonds and mental health:
1- survival function of bonds.
2-CNS cybernetic system
3-working models operating
4-A theory of developmental pathways
Function and organization of emotional bonds:
Control system vs homeostasis
Exploration
Patterns of attachment and their determinants:
“ An experimental study done in Germany shows that at 3 years of age children earlier
assessed as securely attached respond to potential failure with increased effort,
whereas insecurely attached do the opposite. In other words, the securely
attached children are responding with confidence and hope that they can
succeed whilst the insecure are already showing signs of of helplessness and
defeatism. ”
I
Continuity and discontinuity : vulnerability and resilience:
Brown and Harris
Developmental pathways