Download Author: Robson, Kenneth S. MD

13 eBooks available.

Humpty Dumpty

Psychosis, disintegration of the self, has been variously described. Winnicott, in his spare, sometimes elliptical fashion, called it “discontinuity of being,” ruptures of psychological integrity in time and space. Anna Freud described varieties of anxiety, one of which she attributed to “the strength of the instincts.” The child, conceived of as a vessel displaying variable tolerance for pressure from within, can sometimes be overwhelmed, flooded by its own impulses or emotions, and begin to lose its rivets, come apart. In this process the previously acquired skill of evaluating reality is lost, though sometimes it was never secured in the first place. It is distressing to witness a familiar person displaying grotesquely unfamiliar ways. (14 pp.)

Bad Apples

The questions raised in working with delinquent, criminal children and youth lead one to the deepest ethical, religious and philosophical issues: the origin and nature of evil, social versus biological causes of crime, free will versus determinism, penal versus social/therapeutic programming, the age of criminal responsibility, and the malleability of human character. (11 pp.)

Family Matters

The family system is not intrinsically benign. Dysfunction is, given the nature of man, inherent in its structure. It is endowed with enormous power to facilitate but also stunt and sometimes destroy the forward trajectory of a child’s life. In the belly of the family is a child psychiatrist’s diagnostic and therapeutic overlook. (12 pp.)

Hysteria

During pregnancy the self, in its attempts to incorporate a new and unfamiliar other, exhibits bizarre appetites, primitive fears, morbid preoccupations and volcanic eruptions. There is merit in the ancient Greek notion that hysteria results when an unquiet uterus looses its moorings and wanders aimlessly about the pelvic cavity in a peripatetic search for home. It is no wonder that pregnancy’s darker sides speak the language of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Joyce’s Ulysses and keen with the mournful, otherworldly echoes of the whale.

(13 pp.)

Houses Divided

The vast majority of divorces require no intervention, since parents generally resolve their post-divorce lives amicably. Because I am an experienced child psychiatrist, I attract referrals in the most difficult and acrimonious cases. While many “intact” families are rife with endless conflict, in divorce one may see, fully exposed, particular configurations of family life that can drastically reshape children’s futures.  (10 pp.)

In the Beginning

Narcissism’s vise-like grip is maddening to the therapist, fascinating as well, since its centrifugal determination to maintain itself flies in the face of logic, well-being and even life itself. (12 pp.)

The Children’s Hour

The Children’s Hour is a “must-read” according to Dr. Robson’s colleagues in the field of child psychiatry. They are delighted by the book’s combination of compassion, insight, poetry, and candor. They find its emphasis on nonchemical therapy to be a necessary antidote to the more mechanistic, biological approaches currently in vogue. And they note that the book is equally important to professionals and the general public. No one can read this engaging, witty, devastatingly honest, and wonderfully wise memoir without feeling its direct relevance to the sorrows, dangers, and triumphs we have all experienced as children and continue to experience in the lives of the young in our immediate and extended families. Whoever we are, wherever we have been, this book cuts deeply into our common humanity. (113 pp.)

Reviews

“This eloquent book illuminates the art of engaging children in psychotherapy with beautifully written vignettes from the author’s practice. Dr. Robson writes with the language of a pet. With his keen observations and appreciation of the metaphoric language of children, he engages the reader in dramas encountered during his career. His humility, compassion, respect for children, and love of his calling weave together the fabric of his book.”

–Diane H. Schetky MD
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of Vermont College of Medicine

“In a series of vignettes drawn from the span of his career, Dr. Robson observes with the keenest eye, assesses with nimble intelligence, and intervenes with strategic creativity. There are lessons here for the professional and amateur alike. This book is truly for aficionados of mind, relationship, and the human story. In this wonderful work, Dr. Robson establishes himself as the poet laureate of child psychiatry.”

–Harold I. Schwartz MD
Psychiatrist-in-Chief, The Institute of Living

“To read Ken Robson’s Children’s Hour is to spend quality time with one of child psychiatry’s most gifted practitioners. He is as clever a wordsmith as has ever taken up the cause for children’s emotional health. His puckish humor and the vital imagery of his story-telling entertain and instruct.”

–Kyle Pruett MD
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry & Nursing, Yale School of Medicine

–Marsha Kline Pruett PhD
School for Social Work, Smith College

“Who does a child psychiatrist treat? How does a child psychiatrist do it? What works, what doesn’t? And what is the psychiatrist’s life like? This wonderful book meets the reader’s curiosity with a compassionate account of what the doctor and the patient experience–together and apart. Ken Robson is a great story-teller and a great child psychiatrist. The combination is irresistible. Some books give you information, other books give you inspiration. This book gives you both.”

–Lenore Terr MD
author of Magical Moments of Change

Of Human Bondage

There is a critical time period for human infants to connect to their caregivers. When this time passes without the process of attachment running its expectable course, impairments in trust, friendship and empathy result. Children suffering such “detachment” are everywhere and nowhere, unable to live well, love well, die well, or be alone. (11 pp.)

Male and Female Created He Them

The developmental line of gender and sexuality is marked by four nodal points along its sometimes treacherous traverse from birth to adolescence—biological gender; core gender identity (the inner, subjective perception of being male or female, the contours of which are definitively shaped by three years of age); sex role (the culture’s stereotypical patterns and characteristics of boy/girl, man/woman behavior); and, finally, sexual orientation (preference for a male or female sexual partner). (10 pp.)

Unholy Love

Like other developmental phenomena, emerging sexuality is determined by genetic influences, temperament, parent-infant interaction and social mores. At one end of that curve lie emotional constriction and inhibition of eroticism; at the other extreme, one finds incest and/or sexual abuse. (13 pp.)