There are four general approaches to treatment for the symptomatic child. In individual child psychotherapy, the child is seen alone and play therapy is often utilized to help the child become aware of his feelings and express them more appropriately. In conjoint parent-child psychotherapy and counseling, the child is seen together with one…

Three hypotheses derived from Hilde Bruch's formulations regarding onset differences among the obese were tested. In Bruch's theory, adult-onset, or reactive, obesity is a result of psychological trauma; the individual uses eating as a defense against anxiety and depression. Child-onset, or developmental, obesity results from a mixture of…

Work in developmental psychiatry and psychology has increasingly focused on how internal representations of early experiences with primary figures of childhood affect relationship formation in later childhood and adulthood. Investigations of the reflective self function, which involves mental states in which individuals become the subject of their…

The past decade has witnessed a growing awareness of the prevalence and consequences of childhood sexual abuse. This paper presents findings from numerous studies which indicate that adult survivors of incest suffer from devastating personal and interpersonal difficulties. Recent studies on incest claim that some 20 percent of females and over 16…

Fourteen young men and women, who as teenagers had run away from home, were subjects of an intensive clinical case study which was a followup of a larger-scale survey of runaways conducted in the early 1960s. A major purpose of the research was to determine how the former runaways had fared as adults and whether or not their early behavior had…

This study sought to determine if general parent education, in the form of books and workshops, was an effective intervention in cases of moderate parental distress due to difficult child temperament. The parents of six "difficult" children answered questionnaires and were interviewed over several years concerning their child's temperament and its…

A construct labeled "self-silencing" or "loss of voice" as an aspect of female social development is emerging in current literature, and it is postulated that suppression of expression prescribes a more passive and muted role for women and lies at the root of depression in women. This study was a longitudinal project examining earlier parenting…