The Harris Meltzer Trust
3 total works
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.
'This is a new edition of Mattie Harris's papers together with two of Mrs Bick's. The papers span sixteen years of development. They illustrate the conviction that detailed observation, especially as taught by Mrs Bick, is the basis of learning about emotional life. Thus the first few papers, while ostensibly describing the training of a child psychotherapist, are actually a guideline for learning about one's own emotional experience and hence of becoming a person. Mattie was very much inspired by Melanie Klein's teaching but was aware of the basic assumption groupings that arise, both internally and externally, through idealization of a great figure and which are death to individual thinking. Bion was an especial influence on her, particularly his idea of learning from the experience of tolerating frustration, and eschewing memory and desire in order to focus ont he present moment. The majority of her papers link experiences of infant observation with descriptions of analysis of child or adult cases. Each paper describes new aspects of the experience required for the development of an alive character. They are written in the concise,even-handed style of Mattie's personality and show her intense interest in the details that make each of us unique.'- Joan Symington, Child psychiatrist and training analyst, Australian Psychoanalytical Society