Child Colloquium Series

Henry Massie, MD and Nathan Szajnberg, MD will discuss case studies from a prospective psychoanalytic study of paths to emotional health and illness from birth to age 30 and 60. This study, initiated by Sylvia Brody in 1964, included filmed mother-child interaction, projective psychodiagnostic assessments, and psychoanalytically oriented interviews with parents and children. Drs. Massie and Szajnberg inherited the project for the 30-year followup in 1994, which they conducted from an attachment perspective. Findings highlight the relative importance of early attachment versus later childhood trauma for subsequent emotional health. Some participants lives demonstrate how trauma can remain hidden unconsciously and/or intentionally from interviewers until it emerges years later, which raises implications for treatment. Infancy films of four participants followed to age 60 in 2023 will be shown.

Henry Massie, MD is an adult, child and adolescent psychiatrist, and longtime member of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He was formerly Training Director in the Child Psychiatry Residency Program at St. Mary’s Hospital, San Francisco, and formerly Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine. He has published extensively on child development and its disturbances in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and with Nathan Szajnberg authored Lives Across Time: Paths to Emotional Health and Illness From Birth to 30 in 76 people. He has also developed, with B. Kay Campbell, the Massie-Campbell Scale of Attachment During Stress Scale which is a screening tool for troubled parent-infant interaction which is in use world wide. Dr. Massie is based in Berkeley, CA.

Nathan Moses Szajnberg, MD completed psychoanalytic training at the St. Louis Institute.  He is the retired Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University. He has received two NIMH awards in Adolescence and Infant Psychiatry and worked with Dan Stern, Bruno Bettelheim, Peter Blos and Bob Wallerstein. He was the Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis 2005-16. He received the Ticho Award in 2012.

He has written several books on development in Ethiopian children, Israeli soldiers and co-authored Lives Across Time with Henry Massie.

His most recent books are Psychic Mimesis from Bible and Homer to Now and The Secret Symmetry of Maimonides and Freud 2023. His third novel (2023) is A Windmill, A Knight, A Ghost, A Jerusalem.

Bart Blinder, MD PhD is an active member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NPC), senior faculty in adult and child psychoanalysis and chair of the NPC research committee.  He is a distinguished life fellow of APA and AAPAC.   At the APA, Dr. Blinder participated in the establishment of Practice Guidelines, Commission and Caucus on psychotherapy in psychiatry and editing a major text on integrating psychotherapy and pharmacology.  He is a clinical professor and past Director of Eating Disorder Treatment Research at UC Irvine and is on the teaching faculty at University Washington and USC.  His research interests include autobiographical memory, neuro psychoanalysis, spontaneous thought and free association in psychoanalysis, treatment resistant depression, early life trauma, response to psychodynamic treatment, psychodevelopment and neurobiologic roots of somatization, embodiment and eating disorders.

Educational Objectives:
Upon completion of this activity, the learners will be able to

1. describe patterns of early mother-infant interaction and the extent to which they may be predictive of subsequent emotional health.
2. discuss sources of resiliency in children with impaired early attachment to their parents who are doing well as adults.
3. consider interventions in families to prevent subsequent mental health problems in adults.