Child Colloquium Series

At the Hanna Perkins Center in Cleveland, beginning in the 1950s, child analysts have provided consultation to preschool and childcare facilities. In more recent years, psychoanalysts and early childhood care and education professionals, both in the US and elsewhere, have described similar intervention models, as well as research undertaken to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of those models. During the past two decades psychoanalysts have begun to find ways to practice beyond their consultation rooms or, for child analysts, their playrooms. In many communities this has led to myriad endeavors to find ways to interface with those systems where most young children spend so many of their daytime hours. In the proposed presentation Tom and Denia Barrett will describe the model of Consultee-Centered Consultation (CCC) with early childhood care and education programs. Both the process of this model and research in support of its utilization will be articulated. Consideration will be given to the techniques for forging a consultative relationship with an organization, its directors, and staff. There will be focus on the CCC stages of “approach,” “free-neutral,” and “moving-on” as well as on the occurrence of “turnings” as evidence of individual and system change. With the assistance of Shahla Chehrazi, these processes will be illustrated using vignettes from various consultation settings and sessions.

Thomas Barrett, PhD is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Chicago where he is a child and adolescent supervising analyst on the faculty of The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Barrett is a geographic supervisor for the Psychoanalytic Program of the Carolinas, and the Denver Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Barrett undertook post-graduate training in Infant Mental Health with Prof. Selma Fraiberg at the Child Development Project at the University of Michigan. He completed child psychoanalytic training through the Hanna Perkins Center in Cleveland. From 1990 until July of 2010, Dr. Barrett served as Hanna Perkins Executive and Clinical Director and was a member of the Center’s child psychoanalytic training Faculty.

Dr. Barrett is a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (certified in Child/Adolescent Psychoanalysis), the Association for Child Psychoanalysis (where he served as President from 2020-2022), and the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Dr. Barrett has published a variety of professional papers and presents regularly at conferences at local, national, and international venues.

Denia Barrett, MSW is a child and adolescent supervising analyst on the faculty of The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. She is a geographic supervisor for the Saint Louis Psychoanalytic Institute, Psychoanalytic Education Program of the Carolinas, and the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center. She trained at and previously served on the faculty of The Hanna Perkins Center in Cleveland, OH and was the editor of the Center’s journal, Child Analysis: Clinical, Theoretical, and Applied.  She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child and is a member of the editorial review board of Psychoanalytic Social Work. She has written on clinical work, ethics, and supervision and has presented nationally and internationally. She served as President of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis from 2010 to 2012.

Shahla Chehrazi, MD is a Child, Adolescent, and Adult Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has been in private practice about 40 years. She completed her residency in Psychiatry at the Menninger Foundation and and her psychoanalytic training at the SF center for psychoanalysis.

Currently, Shahla is Volunteer Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF and  is on the faculty at San Francisco Center For Psychoanalysis as well as a supervisor at CPMC and UCSF psychiatry training programs. Early in her career, she was involved in developing seminars on mental health issues for preschool teachers and childcare providers which led to her book “Psychosocial Issues in Day Care” published by APA press.

Shahla was the recipient of a major grant from the Miriam and Peter Hass Fund to develop the Early Childhood Mental Health Project at the Burnett Children’s Center.  The program was  an on-site mental health team providing mental health services to the children and their families as well as intensive training for the teaching staff. Her 2023 paper “A Model For a Psychoanalytically Informed Preschool” was recently published in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.