Adolescent Psychoanalysis

The Linden Center

Chapter 14 

 A number of friends have told me that they think the contents of this chapter, Chapter 15, should have been Chapter 1.  They argued that I should focus my thoughts about adolescent psychoanalysis around my experience with the analysis of adolescents at The Linden Center.  However, the chapters are ordered in the way they came to me. Not to run this principle into the ground, but psychoanalysis, particularly with adolescents, is exactly the same.  Things come the way they do. They can’t be planned. 

It was at the beginning of 1980 that I, along with talented partners Jane Hays, Lee Shershow, Marilyn McKnight, and Shirley Phillips founded Linden Center, a residential/day treatment center for very disturbed children and adolescents.  I was the main force.

At The Linden Center, children and adolescents were and are offered Residential Treatment, Special Education, and considerable Individual and Family Psycho-Therapy and Psychoanalysis. Approximately 3300 children and adolescents have participated in 3 day programs, 3 special education schools, residential treatment, as well as individual, group and family psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis over the past 28 years.

The original founders, with the exception of myself, have gone on to a variety of other areas in the fields of mental health and special education.  Lee Shershow, M.D., long time friend, is a graduate of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and Member of the American and International Psychoanalytic Association, is board certified in Psychiatry. His practice is in Oregon.

I have been Director of Linden Center since it’s inception.  During that time, in addition to my duties as Director of The Linden Center, I have continued a full analytic practice, my focus changing more and more to analyzing adolescents.  My contact and participation with the various Institutes in Los Angeles has been progressively more limited and non-existent at present.

I get along with adolescents, both in and out of the consulting room, which has always been a considerable advantage to me. I have given only passing attention to this fact, until the last 5 years. Prior to that, I had considered rarely and briefly, such exotic (sic) explanations as my ‘sterling’ personality, my particular position and experiences socially and academically in grammar school and middle school, being one of the ‘boys’ in High School, a member of a highly social, ‘wild’ fraternity at Berkley, etc. as a possible explanations. Further, I do identify heavily with adolescents.  I also knew that I did and do work very differently than many of my analytic colleagues, in spite of my very broad range of traditional training. And, possibly un-relatedly, have had far too many to count or remember non-analytic experiences with adolescents at The Linden Center, their teachers, therapists, counselors,  parents, etc.

I have analyzed approximately 80 adolescents, largely with seemingly helpful results.  Then, for a variety of reasons, about five years ago,  I became much more interested in trying to understand my work, it’s seeming uniqueness and it’s relationship to psychoanalytic theory and practice as I knew it and know it now. 

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