An Interview with the Novicks

1. What motivated you to write this book? Who is your audience and how do you hope this book will impact parents of young children?

 This is our 4th book and very different from the others which were books written for colleagues. It was based on our many years of work with parents and caregivers in clinical settings and schools. We had been doing school consultation for many years then 17 years ago we started Allen Creek, a school for ordinary families with children from birth to 6. We continued our community engagement work and started the "Alliance for Psychoanalytic Schools" (APS). There are now 12 centers across US and the AF parent /toddler program. At our staff meetings and APS meetings we frequently came back to the problem of how to convey the philosophy, approaches, techniques used in these schools to non professionals. Parents at Allen Creek frequently said that they wanted so much to convey what they and their children learned but couldn't find the words. This is a problem for each of these schools but also for all developmental researchers and child psychoanalysts. How do you convey abstract notions such as ego strength, attunement, resilience, self reflection, self esteem, self regulation and so forth. Kerry and I began using the words "emotional muscle" in our parent groups and our weekly meeting with teachers. I began using it with the children I observed and everyone, young and old, immediately understood the metaphor and the connotation of work, effort, persistence, pleasure in the effort and subsequent competence. It was a term which first came from our clinical work, especially with young men who spent so much time and effort in developing physical muscles. In a forthcoming article in the PSC we have written about the psychoanalytic and research findings behind our use of the term . That article is for our colleagues but the book was written for parents, grand parents, teachers and all those who care for children. Incidentally it is also for clinicians who can be encouraged to find a language which ordinary people can find useful and relevant.

2. How do you feel your years at the Hampstead Clinic influenced this work and who you are today?

As we said in "Altruistic Analysis" the language of psychoanalysis when it first appeared at the start of the 20th century was vivid, relevant , accessible to a wide range of people. Anna Freud carried on that tradition and to hear her speak at the many meetings at the hampstead clinic was to be in the presence of a mind that could put forth the most abstract and complex ideas with utmost clarity. Strachey's translation turned the the profound immediacy of Freud's words into academic, Greek sounding abstractions. It probably made analysts think that they were being "scientific" to speak of "cathexis" rather than the common word "placement", Ego instead of "I" and so forth. It took us many years to realize how influenced we were by Anna Freud's style of thinking and expression.

3. With the training over now, how do you feel we can continue to teach others about Anna Freud's work and how can we keep it alive and relevant? Do you feel your book is an example of how to do that? (I certainly feel it is!)

We hope that our book carries on the tradition of Anna Freud and especially the relevance of psychoanalytic developmental observations expressed with clarity and usefulness. We speak to parents, teachers and children about waiting muscles and how it takes stronger muscles to wait for a turn than ride the bike. We talk of "inside helpers" a phrase used by Erna Furman rather than Super ego and keeping mommy in mind for object constancy.

4. In past publications you have advocated the need to promote a more structured  stance to working with parents, do this line of thinking influenced the development of this " emotional muscle" concept?

Over the twelve years we studied and worked at the Hampstead clinic we could see the value of Anna Freud's capacity to encompass complexities as in her "metapsychological profile" and realized only later how this turned her attention to an equal emphasis on normality. She told Solnit that she felt that the field of normal development is where child analysis would prove its worth (Quoted by E, Young-Bruehl) Normality is situated in reality and parents are the child's reality. At the Hampstead clinic we were never discouraged from working concurrently with the parents of our child patients.This experience evolved as we could see , often from painful experience, that child analysis must include work with parents. Here too one is then challenged to find a language which will create and forge an alliance with parents rather than a battle over who is the better parent.