Child Colloquium Series

Henry Massie, MD and Nathan Szajnberg, MD will present case studies from a psychoanalytic study of the path to emotional health and illness from birth to age 30.  Cases will illustrate findings from this longitudinal study initiated by Sylvia Brody that began in the third trimester of pregnancy with filmed mother-child interaction, developmental testing, and psychoanalytically oriented interviews with parents and children.  The participants were followed into adulthood by Henry Massie and Nathan Szajnberg from an attachment perspective. Their findings highlight the relative importance of early attachment versus childhood trauma for understanding the participants’ emotional growth.  Some participants’ stories also demonstrate how emotional and physical trauma may remain hidden unconsciously or intentionally from careful interviewers until it emerged years later. The presentation will explore how these findings can help clinicians have an impact on the growth and healing of individuals who have had emotional and physical trauma.

Henry Massie, MD is an adult, child and adolescent psychiatrist, and longtime member of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He was formerly Training Director in the Child Psychiatry Residency Program at St. Mary’s Hospital, San Francisco, and formerly Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine. He has published extensively on child development and its disturbances in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and with Nathan Szajnberg authored Lives Across Time: Paths to Emotional Health and Illness From Birth to 30 in 76 people. He has also developed, with B. Kay Campbell, the Massie-Campbell Scale of Attachment During Stress Scale which is a screening tool for troubled parent-infant interaction which is in use world wide. Dr. Massie is based in Berkeley, CA.

Nathan Moses Szajnberg, MD completed psychoanalytic training at the St. Louis Institute.  He is the retired Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University. He has received two NIMH awards in Adolescence and Infant Psychiatry and worked with Dan Stern, Bruno Bettelheim, Peter Blos and Bob Wallerstein. He was the Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis 2005-16. He received the Ticho Award in 2012.

He has written several books on development in Ethiopian children, Israeli soldiers and co-authored Lives Across Time with Henry Massie.

His most recent books are Psychic Mimesis from Bible and Homer to Now and The Secret Symmetry of Maimonides and Freud 2023. His third novel (2023) is A Windmill, A Knight, A Ghost, A Jerusalem.

Bart Blinder, MD PhD is an active member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NPC), senior faculty in adult and child psychoanalysis and chair of the NPC research committee.  He is a distinguished life fellow of APA and AAPAC.   At the APA, Dr. Blinder participated in the establishment of Practice Guidelines, Commission and Caucus on psychotherapy in psychiatry and editing a major text on integrating psychotherapy and pharmacology.  He is a clinical professor and past Director of Eating Disorder Treatment Research at UC Irvine and is on the teaching faculty at University Washington and USC.  His research interests include autobiographical memory, neuro psychoanalysis, spontaneous thought and free association in psychoanalysis, treatment resistant depression, early life trauma, response to psychodynamic treatment, psychodevelopment and neurobiologic roots of somatization, embodiment and eating disorders.