This COCAP volume is a profound and timely contribution. Psychoanalytic understandings of compulsive disorders expressed through the body in infants, children, and adolescents including psychosomatic disorders in infants, repetitive behavioral disorders in young children, and emotional disorders in adolescence that underlie addiction, self-harm, and suicide are discussed in lucid theoretical and clinical terms. Given the epidemic proportions of addiction and self-harm in adults today, this book demonstrates possible early life roots of pathology and offers a crucial foundation for therapists, educators, and members of the public devoted to alleviating self-destructive disorders in those whom they serve and/or love.
Harriet L. Wolfe, M.D., Past President, International Psychoanalytical Association
This book tackles in a truly courageous, in-depth, and innovative way the theme of a ubiquitous psychosocial macro-phenomenon that characterizes our era, which dramatically endangers the development of new generations and which, until now, has not found adequate tools for understanding and community responses.
It is the most advanced contemporary theoretical-clinical text on this subject, thanks to the contributions of an interregional scientific network of the highest excellence, and offers fundamental help to all those who deal with these scenarios of suffering and who want to acquire useful and substantial tools for understanding and working.
Stefano Bolognini, Past President, International Psychoanalytical Association
This new volume in the COCAP series brings together leading psychoanalytic perspectives on compulsion, addiction, self-harm, and suicidal states in infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Grounded in clinical material and theoretical elaboration, it explores early bodily experience, failures of symbolization, and the pathways from autoerotic regulation to destructive repetition. Contributors show how trauma, narcissistic fragility, and the digital environment shape new forms of suffering in the young. By linking early psychic organization to later psychopathology, this indispensable book speaks not only to clinicians but to all professionals working with children and adolescents across diverse fields of care and education.
Virginia Ungar, M.D., Past President, International Psychoanalytical Association
In this remarkable volume the editors bring a series of deeply insightful and clinically rich chapters written by leading specialists in child and adolescent psychoanalysis from around the world, exploring some of the most urgent and complex issues facing families today.
With empathy and depth, the contributors address themes such as compulsion, psychosomatic manifestations, anorexia, substance abuse, self-harm, suicide, societal pressures, destructiveness and masochismexamining how these painful manifestations speak to deeper psychic realities. A central focus of the book is the nuanced exploration of the libidinization of the body as a protective mechanism against self-destruction.
Catalina Bronstein, M.D., Training Analyst, British Psychoanalytical Society
