Continuing Education Workshops
The 18th Annual Irving Schulman Symposium
Childism
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Ph.D
Saturday, November 19, 2011
9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. in Wellness Center Auditorium; Registration begins at 8:30am
This lecture will argue that there is a prejudice against children and young people as a group that is comparable to racism, sexism, homophobia. It is a prejudice that legitimates and rationalizes a huge continuum of acts that are not “in the best interests of children,” including the often violent extreme of “child abuse and neglect.” She also shows, however, that the way in which “child abuse and neglect” has been analyzed and sub-divided into types has stood in the way both of recognizing child maltreatment as a manifestation of prejudice and of exploring the prejudice and its forms.
Children –the victims—understand the purposes childism serves, the forms it takes, and the motivations of people who abuse them, and it should be one of the goals of psychoanalytic treatment to help them articulate their knowledge. What children and adults who were harmed as children know can show us that childism takes basically three forms, in which children are imagined as bad, wild, or rebellious. Their experience can also allow us to see these forms in social policies that assume children are burdensome, exploitable for services, or unworthy of having independent identities.
Participation in this program will enable you to:
--To acquire a working knowledge of the ingredients of psychoanalytic theory of prejudice
--To define prejudice against children or childism and describe its basic forms
--To study the basic forms of childism as they are revealed in psychoanalytic treatments.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, PhD, is a writer and psychoanalyst, based in Toronto, where she is a member of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society, co-director of Caversham Productions (“Psychoanalytic Educational Resources”), and blogs at Whosafraidofsocialdemocracy.com. She is the author of many books, including Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart (with Faith Bethelard), Where Do We Fall When We Fall In Love? and Why Arendt Matters. Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children will be published in January, 2012. Recently, Dr. Young-Bruehl has been appointed General Editor of The Collected Writings of D.W. Winnicott by the Winnicott Trust in London.
Workshop in Honor of Dr. Irving Schulman
To read Dr. Irving Schulman’s extensive curriculum vitae is to see the impact he had on the field of psychology. To have known Dr. Schulman was to know a man who had a tremendous influence intellectually, professionally, and emotionally on people’s lives.
An adjunct associate professor inWidener’s Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology, Dr. Schulman died January 20, 1993, at the age of 71. During his 40 years in the field of psychology, Dr. Schulman became renowned for his work in the areas of self-psychology and treatment of emotionally disturbed children, but he was first a teacher, having trained hundreds of psychologists and mental health professionals during his career.
Dr. Schulman received his bachelor’s (1948), master’s (1949), and doctoral (1953) degrees in psychology from New York University. After graduate school, Dr. Schulman took a position as chief clinical psychologist at the Child Study Center of Philadelphia, an outpatient treatment center for emotionally disturbed children and their parents. After 10 years at the Child Study Center, Dr. Schulman accepted the position of co-director, and eventually director, of the Philadelphia Psychiatric Center’s Institute for Children and Youth. In 1979, after sixteen years at the institute, Dr. Schulman accepted a faculty position with the Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Philadelphia and also took on the duties of director of the Center for Guidance Services, an outpatient psychological, diagnostic, and treatment center in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
In 1984, Dr. Schulman accepted an associate professorship with Hahnemann University and later moved with the program to Widener University in 1990, where he stayed until his death. Throughout his career, Dr. Schulman maintained a private practice diagnosing and treating children, adolescents, and adults.
Dr. Jules C. Abrams, the founding director of Widener’s Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology, said Dr.Schulman’s contributions to the institute were many and have been sorely missed. “Irving earned the respect and admiration of his students and colleagues,” Abrams said. “He gave much more than just the time for his courses and frequently would have his students over to his home. He was a very giving person.”
Joan Lavender (‘90) remarked, “We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn from the elder generation of classically trained analysts who had the foresight to integrate self-psychology principles into their work. Now, amidst the havoc of managed care, it is even more important to hold onto my appreciation of the irreducible complexity and subtlety involved in the psychotherapy process.”
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