Exploring the Dialectical Space: A Brief History of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child

Abrams, currently the longest serving editor of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, offers his views of emerging models and themes in the understanding of children, which has characterized The PSOC since its inception in 1945. In his view, the first of its published papers, Hartmann and Kris's "The Genetic Approach in Psychoanalysis," set the stage for examining innovative ways to view the growth of the mind in general and the psychological development of children in particular. In his judgment, many of its published papers have highlighted expectable dispositional discontinuities as well as recognizable continuities interacting with a varying and sometimes unexpected set of environment circumstances. That interaction occurs within a dialectical space that contributes its own unique influences. This investigative trend, scattered throughout its nearly seventy-year history, may reflect the recognition for the need for a different foundational theory for our discipline or perhaps a new paradigm altogether.