Child Colloquium Series

The author describes her career-long proclivity for the treatment of adolescents and reflects on the elements that attract her toward work with adolescents.  Over time the author came to understand her protectiveness of the adolescent process emanated from having been in some danger of missing the adolescent process herself.  Adolescents act in and act out in order to get to know themselves.  The author uses the metaphor of surfing to describe the adolescent (or herself in their wake) potentially upended, injured or even killed by waves too tumultuous to manage.  Yet, surfing also captures the sensual beauty of finding a balance, of the thrill of the ride, of a moment of being fully, sparklingly alive.

Dr. Mary Brady is an adult and child psychoanalyst in private practice in San Francisco. She is on the Faculties of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.  She is Editor of Braving the Erotic Field in the Treatment of Children and Adolescents, published by Routledge in 2022.  Her books, Analytic Engagements with Adolescents: Sex, Gender and Subversion and The Body in Adolescence: Psychic Isolation and Physical Symptoms were published by Routledge in 2018 and 2016 respectively. She is North American Co-Chair of the Committee on Child Analysis (COCAP) of the IPA. She co-leads a Psychoanalysis and Film group.