Evoluzione e disturbi del movimento
Basi e nuove prospettive per conoscere il bambino
Evolutions and movement disorders
Basis and new prospects for the child's world comprehension
Enclosed videorecording
Roberto Carlo Russo
Publishing: (2003) Casa Editrice Ambrosiana, Milano.
The purpose of the book is to deal with the organization and evolution of the motor schemes with their respective variables edging on the border between the normality and the pathology (often these variables have not been considered as normal) and the child's anomalies are due to organic and/or relational factors. It is stressed the importance of the negative effects that the motor disorders have both on the cognitive and relational aspect.It is proposed a motor evaluation done by observing the game activities that the child usually does. This evaluating method allows the therapist to catch the child's effective organization of movement and its repercussions on the child's motor strategies, on his abilities, on the minimum effort of his movements and on the emotional charge he expresses. In particular, the evolution of the motor schemes is looked at in relation to the child's different activities and it is correlated to the kind of experiences he has lived.It is also important to emphasize the new personal motor evaluation of the child's typical game activities and where it is possible, the respective neurofunctional correlations. The evolutionary progression of the motor action, originally formulated 1985, is faced through the change from the coordination to the inhibition of the stimulus diffusion, and to the somatic integration process. The analysis of the motor action disorders allow to identify a series of factors depending on the functional processes of specific neurological structures. Furthermore, a set of tests is given to evaluate specifically some aspects concerning the motor field. Lastly, the book is about the genesis of the child's different abilities beginning at his earlier stages of life and following his earlier voluntary activities, his mechanisms of defence and praxies. Not only does the author deal with the evolutions and movement disorders but also formulates the subject according to a global viewpoint where the motor abilities are the main instruments to know and to relate with life.In order to let the reader clearly understand what has been stated a videorecording has been enclosed to the book. It shows images regarding the normal evolution of the child's specific activities, the motor action disorders and the motor organization difficulties. These have been divided into three psychomotor pathologies The motor weakness, the insufficient motor inhibition and the light cerebral insufficiency. A glossary of specific terms is given at the end of the book.
Il senso dell'azione in psicoterapia infantile
The meaning of action in child psychotherapy
Individual therapy and support of the environment
Roberto Carlo Russo
Presentation of the book
The book deals with the relational problems of children through a global intervention. This approach goes through three closely connected interventions (each still maintaining their own work modality): psychotherapy, parental support and cooperation with school and educational structures. The text refers to the dynamics relative to child development during the evolutionary process and to the complex play of factors weaving the tissue within which this young individual grows up. Among these aspects, of primary importance are the knowledge of the child history, of its needs, personal and family events, characteristics of the parental and social models within which the child is placed. These elements are essential to understand the progressive structuring of the pathological process. The possibility of integrating the three areas mentioned above facilitates a therapeutic progression which is adequate to the reality in which the child is the bearer of a problem which at times is just the symptom of a malaise belonging to the family or to social life. Psychotherapy, familiar and educational support need moments of comparison and adaptation to the new objectives which arise during the child journey.
The work of parental support and counselling, the collaboration with school operators presupposes as primary objective that of helping the comprehension and the formulation of the child’s problems. These interventions have to presuppose a community of intents that aims to bring out communication problems between the parts, to avoid guilty isolation of parents and to strengthen the necessary alliance among the parts. This networking is to have a positive influence on the life of the child. In this theoretical-practical framework the child is the primary focus and psychotherapy is the instrument helping the reconstruction of a healthy psycho-affective development and supporting the relational world of the minor. The psychotherapeutic approach applies to the person in all its aspects (affective, motor, cognitive, relational), with a special attention to the dynamics interacting among lived experiences, motivations and child potential. This working mode breaks with the classic psychotherapeutic models and uses a new mediator in the relationship between the child and the therapist: the acting-in, a game for two, a transitional area where the therapist accompanies the child in actions and language along a path of self-reconstruction.
The approach of child psychotherapy is directed to the “Person” as a whole and particularly to the interactive dynamics of lived experiences, motives and potentialities. The alliance with the child takes place in the respect and acceptance of the identity of the person and of its characteristics and it favours the creation of a “safe base” with the therapist. The therapeutic mediator is the playful activity which facilitates the emerging of the child’s lived experiences through symbolic play, phantasmatic productions and the imaginary. The therapeutic path focuses on the need for the child to live problems concretely together with the therapist in order to let the psychodynamic meaning of problems emerge with their relative elaboration. For the child it’s the beginning of a new path which will favour the discovery of its own capacity to elaborate dynamics and to re-live them concretely together with the therapist. For the child, the fact of living a different adaptation to the situation at hand has a strong evolutionary meaning because during childhood it is through actions that favourable regressions can take place. In turn, these regressions can bring about a positive re-elaboration of the organisation of the self. Elaboration and evolution taking place through actions can set out new psychic traces that form the base for a transition from the pre-symbolic to the symbolic and from there to thought. The evolution of therapy is progressively stimulated toward the process of autonomy, the strengthening of trust of the Self, the conquest of sociability, by respecting the potential and needs of the child. The therapist is the person who accompanies the child in the new evolutionary process and who facilitates the evolutionary steps through play, imagination, drawings, telling about oneself and phantasmatic productions.
The correlation with the system environment-child is fundamental to know how dynamics and child behaviour work within the family and socially and to understand the evolution of therapeutic sessions. This aim is reached through talks to support the parents and to solve dynamics that disturb the relation to the child and to provide useful information to facilitate an adequate educative process. In many cases it will be necessary to collaborate with teachers and other people who look after the child. The intervention on parents and socio-educational structures will have to be carried out by an operator other than the therapist, with whom periodical meetings will take place in order to exchange information and coordinate common evolutionary objectives.