Download Author: Robson, Kenneth S. MD

13 eBooks available.

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.)

Fear and Trembling

Certain catastrophes in certain children can forever change biology by creating and maintaining early warning systems, perpetual wariness, in a world that, long afterwards, remains ever hazardous and threatening —in which the demons of nightmares become real. The presence or persistence of post-traumatic symptoms need not outweigh the healthy capacity to live. Child psychiatrists can sometimes provide a road map, without shortcuts, toward the resumption of travel in the right direction. (11 pp.)

Rooted Sorrows

For the child with a blackly depressive mood, more tools than time’s passage are required: psychotherapy, medication and a panoramic lens that widens one’s view of the world. Will doesn’t always produce a way, but it helps when hell waits around one’s corner.(12 pp.)

Visitation

All varieties of psychological disorder, beginning in childhood and moving into adolescence and adult life, tend to be organized by obsessive-compulsive phenomena, whether they are repetitive images or ritualized behaviors. In this respect they may alert the clinician, like highway flares, to trouble ahead. At times they are furtive, arriving suddenly and silently, leaving without a trace. Or they may become relatively fixed as annoying companions or alien, persecutory furies. (11 pp.)

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.)