From Lynne Scalia:

As CCMPS Executive Director, I come from the perspective of a 30 years+ educator who believes PreK-12th schools need and would find relief and understanding if more psychoanalytic thinking was incorporated in working with young people. This is especially the case as we see a wide variety of students, each with their own unique needs, desires, and backgrounds, more included than ever in general classroom and special settings. Now, retired from education in Montana, but still involved in public school education in Colorado, I intend primarily to use this blog to explore conceptual and structural openings between psychoanalysis and education.

For now, on this first day of 2025, I want to share a passage from Melanie Klein’s Narrative of a Child Analysis, first published in 1975. This book is a daily record and reflections of an analysis of a 10-year old child, Richard, which lasted 4 months (93 sessions!) during World War II in England. In the preface, Klein writes:

Working-through was one of the essential demands that Freud made on an analysis. The necessity to work through is again and again proved in our day-to-day experience: for instance, we see that patients, who at some stage have gained insight, repudiate this very insight in the following sessions and sometimes even seem to have forgotten that they had ever accepted it. It is only by drawing our conclusions from the material as it reappears in different contexts, and is interpreted according, that we gradually help the patient to acquire insight in a more lasting way. The process of adequately working-through includes bringing about change in the character and strength of the manifold splitting processes which we meet with, even in neurotic patients, as well as the consistent analysis of paranoid and depressive anxieties. Ultimately, this leads to greater integration. (pgs. 12-13).

There is a treasure trove of Klein’s work located at the Melanie Klein Trust. Check out the child’s drawing of Envy. Oh, and yes, I know that in the psychoanalytic world Klein is considered to be “modern” but not big M modern. You will find that study and research into various schools of psychoanalytic thought is the order of business here. Innovation, creativity, a democratic community, and relevance to today’s world is what we seek.

(Photo by Louisiana naturalist, Taylor Naquin)