Your Teenager: Thinking About Your Child During the Secondary School Years (Psychology, Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy) - Softcover

Harris, Martha; Harris Williams, Meg

9781855754089: Your Teenager: Thinking About Your Child During the Secondary School Years (Psychology, Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1855754088 ISBN 13: 9781855754089

Publisher: Karnac Books, 2007

The three books collected here in one volume were first published in 1969 as part of a complete year-by-year series on child development written by therapists from the Tavistock Clinic. The purpose of the series was to describe for parents the normal features and problems encountered in bringing up children from birth onwards. Martha Harris was unusually well qualified to write the books on the secondary school years, owing to her experience and training as teacher, teacher-trainer, psychoanalyst, and her position as head of the training of child psychotherapists in the Child and Family unit at the Tavistock for many years. She also co-operated with her husband Roland Harris―head of an inner-city comprehensive school―in pioneering a schools counselling service; and in addition to her direct professional experience she had teenage children at the time of writing these books.

The books offer practical guidance in all the compartments of school and family life―friends, brothers and sisters, studies, leisure interests, together with the problem areas of harmful or anti-social behavior. These are set in the context of the mental and physical development of children in these growth-spurt years. In particular, parents are helped to consider imaginatively the impact of the teenager’s life at school, where most of their time is spent, yet which can frequently be a closed book to parents once their child has moved on from primary education.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Martha Harris (1919-1987) read English at University College London and then Psychology at Oxford. She taught in a Froebel Teacher Training College and was trained as a Psychologist at Guys Hospital, as a Child Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, where she was for many years responsible for the child psychotherapy training in the department of Children and Families, and as a Psychoanalyst at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis. Together with her first husband, Roland Harris (a teacher), she started a pioneering schools counselling service. With her second husband, Donald Meltzer, she wrote a psychoanalytical model of The Child in the Family in the Community for multidisciplinary use in schools and therapeutic units.

Review:

Two books associated with Martha Harris: Your Teenager and The Story of Infant Development (by Romana Negri, catalogue number 25825) are being published simultaneously to inaugurate the successor to the Roland Harris Educational Trust: the Harris Meltzer Trust. MARTHA HARRIS AS AN EDUCATOR'The impact she had on those she taught derived from her being, as well as from the power of her presentation of psychoanalytic ideas ... Her approach to learning was a beautiful exemplification of Bion's ideas. Many of her colleagues can bear witness to the subtlety of her judgments of people - and very many students benefited from her sensitive contact with the creative spark inside them which could elude other observers but which Mattie could seek out and nourish.' - Margaret Rustin, Head of Child Psychotherapy, Tavistock Clinic 'It was through Martha Harris that I first gained an inkling of what real teaching and learning is: of the distinction, for example, between knowledge and wisdom, between quantity and quality; of the diffidence and humility as well as the courage and resilience involved in the life-long venture of growing up. Her passionate commitment to helping a person, at whatever age or stage, to develop, tended to stir in others an answering passion, less imitative than aspirational - the desire to become more oneself and to have a mind of one's own.'- Margot Waddell, Psychoanalyst and Child Psychotherapist 'By both background and inclination, Mattie was a scholar of English literature and a teacher. Nothing was more foreign to her nature than the administrative requirements that devolved upon her at the Tavistock. The way in which she came to terms with this was by framing a radical pedagogical method, many of whose central ideas came from Roland [her husband]. The central conviction, later hallowed in Bion's concept of "learning from experience", was that the kind of learning which transformed a person into a professional worker had to be rooted in the intimate relations with inspired teachers, living and dead, present and in books.' - Donald Meltzer, Psychoanalyst Contents1 The teenager at school2 Work and further education3 Leisure interests and activities4 Family relationships5 The teenager and society6 Sex and love7 Towards finding an identity and living creativelyAppendix A: Martha Harris's philosophy of education - by Meg Harris WilliamsAppendix B: extracts from a model of the child-in-the-family-in-the-community - by Donald Meltzer and Martha Harris

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.