Psychodynamic Perspectives on Working with Children, Families, and Schools [Hardcover]

Lombardi includes a truly lovely description of a school program, organized by a philosophy professor, that recognizes small children as the philosophers they can be. ... Many clinicians will find this book enriching. For psychoanalysts, who believe that we have knowledge and skills with wide applications to the most entrenched social problems, this book will be both an inspiration and a guide to creative thinking about education.Michael O'Loughlin is one of the wisest persons I know. He is brilliant and this book will enlighten many people. It is highly readable and it delivers a number of profound findings. I highly recommend it to lay readers and professionals. Students will find it highly informative and easy to read.For school professionals seeking to work in emotionally focused ways with children, this book offers a wide range of essays illustrating how psychodynamic ideas can be used to validate children, respect the contexts of their communities, and create nonauthoritarian classrooms in which such children might develop to their fullest potential.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 pathololÓ-