Looking Forward and Looking Back

Reflections of a Child and Adult Psychoanalytic Educator

Bibliographic Data

ID7982820
AuthorsWendy Olesker (0000-0002-1636-5915, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume45
Issue2
Pages228-243
Publication date2025-02-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePsychoanalytic Inquiry (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0735-1690 • E-ISSN: 1940-9133
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07351690.2025.2463841
OpenAlexW4409313570
LanguageEN
References cited28

Reflecting on my evolving career led me to an appreciation of how my earliest interests and values were developed and applied in multiple ways. An older disturbed sibling created an interest in why people are as they are, and involvement in my parent’s social activism led to a commitment to helping fewer people but in deep ways. I was exposed in my earliest training to the fascinating aspects of earliest mother child interactions patterns. This led me to develop a growing interest in internalization processes, which then led to many varied career paths. While treating patients of varied ages over long courses of psychoanalysis, I also ran a normal nursery for infants and toddlers, taught about earliest development, immersed myself in the analytic scholarship, joined study groups about gender development and coordinating analytic and developmental processes, and later set up training programs to facilitate the internalizing processes in the younger generation. Being on editorial boards and engaging in longitudinal research added more layers of complexity to the understanding of processes of most interest to me. The beauty of a career in psychoanalysis is that it is forever interesting, enriching and growth producing

Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Child Therapy and Development · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications

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