Development of Aggression in Early Childhood [Paperback]

Parens's scholarship is truly impressive.[This book] will undoubtedly be turned to repeatedly for its careful formulations and its explications of the interdigitations of the evolving drives, narcissism, ego functions, and libidinal object relations in early childhood.This revised edition of The Development of Aggression in Early Childhood presents anew the author's multi-trends theory of aggression, with the addition of a two-part preface that provides an overview of the multitudinous theories of aggression in psychoanalytic thought and a discussion of the clinical applications-with clinical case examples-of his theory.Now more than ever, understanding the nature of aggression is crucial to our understanding of individual and social ills produced by the accumulation in humans of hostile destructiveness. The Development of Aggression in Early Childhood, first published in 1979, is here reissued in a revised edition because the author's multi-trends theory of aggression and its clinical and social applications have held up cogently and productively for nearly thirty years. Dr. Parens' observation-based explication of highly different forms or trends of aggression is experience-near and is, he argues, of greater heuristic merit than the assumption that humans are inherently 'seething cauldrons of destructive excitations.' The responsibility for the hostility and hate we experience in our world today, according to Dr. Parens, lies with the way we are reared, educated, and treated individually and sociallyand not with the assumption that we are ab ovo driven to destroy. In this revised edition, Parens' theory is offset by a two-part Preface that provides a historical overview of the multitudinous theories of aggression in psychoanalytic thought and discusses the clinical applications of the multi-trends theory of aggression with case studies and further clinical theorizing about hostile destructiveness and clinical technique. This book is intended not onlyl'