Posts Tagged Under: María Moya Guirao M.D.

Edith Jacobson Biography

Edith Jacobson

Edith Jacobson

Biography of Edith Jacobson

Edith Jacobson (1897-1978) was a German psychoanalyst doctor who was born into a Jewish family of doctors from Lower Silesia. She was part of the first generation of women with university education after the First World War.

This psychoanalyst was a very politically committed person. The Gestapo stopped her in October 1935. Fleeing from the Nazi threat she settled in the United States of America, where she died in 1978 (Rochester, New York). In America, Jacobson was a member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in New York. In that institute he worked as a psychoanalyst for many years.

But back to its beginnings, Edith Jacobson, who had graduated as a doctor and worked as a pediatrician in a hospital in the German city of Heidelberg, began to be interested in Psychoanalysis as a result of knowing sexuality of the kids through his work as a pediatrician.

In 1925 Edith Jacobson entered the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin where he had as teachers Sándor Rado, Franz Alexander and Otto Fenichel. Jacobson performed with the latter his Didactic Analysis.

In his early work Edith Jacobson included extensive and detailed clinical material of his experience in the treatment of children with psychic problems. In these studies on child psychic pathology we can be seen a clear influence of the two great founders of psychoanalysis of children, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein.

Among the most important contributions made by Edith Jacobson deserve to mention their interesting studies on the Depression, Psychosis and the Freudian psychic instances of the Self, Id and the Super-ego.

The theories of Edith Jacobson are framed within the current developed by Marxist psychoanalysts of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Among these psychoanalysts were Wilhelm Reich and his wife Annie (the latter became a great friend of Edith), Otto Fenichel, Erich Fromm, etc. This group of psychoanalysts, we could say “from the left“, emphasized the importance of external reality for psychological development and the social influence in the development of neuroses.

In this line, Edith Jacobson argued that the environmental factor of reality was as important as the internal world of

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The Hospitalism and Rene Spitz

beloved mother

beloved mother

The american psychoanalyst Rene Spitz (1887-1974) described the Hospitalism Syndrome in 1945. This syndrome occurs in babies when they are separated from a loving mother for a period of more than three months.
Hospitalism is caused by not being attended children in their emotional needs (hugs, caresses, talking to them, smiling, etc.), even if they had been given exquisite care in their physical needs (food, medical care, proper clothing, etc.).

This Rene Spitz discovery, hospitalism, made it necessary to take into account the emotional and affective needs of babies admitted to institutions. And so, mothers were allowed to stay with their children when they were admitted to a hospital. The presence of the mother with the child reduces anxiety and helps a faster recovery; that is why currently in children’s hospitals, mothers are allowed to stay with their sick children.

But a sick child should not be overprotected, and it will be treated, as far as possible, not too different from the rest of the children of their age. Most children’s hospitals have teachers and a “school” where children can go every day to perform different tasks. This is especially important for children who have to be hospitalized for a long time.

The family will give the sick children affection and attention. Family must help and facilitate proper activities for his sick childrem. But family will take special care that the child does not obtain certain “secondary earnings” on account of his sick status.

In summary, the Hospitalism Syndrome will be avoided with the presence with of their beloved mother.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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Skinner and Sigmund Freud

Burrhus Frederic Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner

Did you know…..

that Skinner, the father of Behaviorism, quotes Sigmund Freud more than ten times in one of his books?

Perhaps many behaviorists do not know that Burrhus Frederic Skinner in his book “Science and Human Behavior“, published in 1953, speaks in very flattering terms about Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis.

Among these quotes is the following:

Skinner recognizes the importance of Freud in relating childhood events to behaviors in adult life.

He also says verbatim: “Perhaps prudent men have always known that we are predisposed to see things as we want to see them instead of how they are, but thanks to Sigmund Freud we are much more aware today of the “thought of desire”.

To explain certain aspects of the “positive reinforcement” of certain behaviors, he resorts to the Freudian concept of “Sublimation“. And he adds: “For example, A marriage without children can sublimate their paternal instinct treating their puppy as a son”.

In the chapter on punishment he says: “The fact that punishment does not permanently reduce a tendency to respond, agrees with Freud’s discovery of the survival of the activity of what he called repressed desires”.

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Sigmund Freud Biograghy

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Who is Sigmund Freud?

Sigmund Freud, the father of Psychoanalysis, was born on May 6, 1856 in a middle class family in Freiburg (Moravia). When Freud was 4 years old his family moved to Víena.

In 1865 Freud began his secondary studies, which curiously began a year earlier than it was the usual age at that time, and ended with an excellent rating (Summa Cum Laude). Then he began Medicine at the University of Víena.

Already as a student, Sigmund Freud entered the physiological laboratory of Bruecke where he began his research career, centered in those early years in Neurology. Parallely Freud began their publications.

In 1884, Sigmund Freud investigated the anesthetic properties of the cocaine, substance that at that time in Europe was little known. At the same time his friend Carl Koller demonstrated the anesthetic properties of cocaine in Ophthalmology.
Shortly after (1884) Freud entered like professor in University of Víena.
In 1885 he received a scholarship to go to Paris to study with the famous Jean Martin Charcot at the “Hospital de la Salpêtrière“. At that time this French doctor studied the possibilities of hypnosis as a treatment of Hysteria.

After returning from France, Sigmund Freud marched to the Kassowitz Institute in Berlin where he studied the cerebral palsies of children.

Later on, in 1889, Sigmund Freud traveled to Nancy (France) to see how Liébault M.D. and Bernheim M.D. used hypnotic suggestion as a therapeutic technique, not only for Hysteria but also for other neurotic disorders.

His biographer Ernest Jones tells us that Sigmund Freud was a family man, a lover of his profession and a tireless worker.
Freud was a very cultured man who spoke French and English perfectly, as well as Spanish,  which he had learned reading “Don Quixote” in the language of Cervantes. During his youth he also translated several works by Charcot and Bernheim into German.
Sigmund Freud was a great lover of the work of Goethe and Shakespeare, as well as the Greco-Roman culture.

When he reached fame and glory, he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw and palate against which he fought for 16 years, in the course of which Dr. Pichler performed a total of thirty-three operations under local anesthesia, in addition to radiation. The last ones were so bloody that he agreed, at the insistence of hes doctor, to administer an analgesic called Novocaine. He had previously refused to take painkillers, despite the intense pains he suffered. One of those operations was so drastic that the nasal cavity was communicated with his mouth, so he had to use a jaw and palate prosthesis.
Ernest Jones says in his biography that “he was a perfect patient … Whatever the degree of suffering, there was never a hint of irritability or annoyance in him“.

The University of Clark in the United States invited Sigmund Freud to

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Anna Freud Biograghy

Anna Freud

Anna Freud

Who is Anna Freud ?

Anna Freud (1895-1982) was born in Víena (Austria). She was the youngest of Sigmund Freud‘s six children. Anna studied pedagogy and worked as a teacher, but later on she became psychoanalyst and dedicated herself to the Psychoanalysis of children, being a pioneer in this field.

Anna Freud theories on the analysis of children were published in a small work entitled “Introduction to the technique of psychoanalysis of children“, where she raised a criticism of the theories of Melanie Klein, disagreement that lasted forever.

In 1936 she published his most important work entitled “The Ego and defense mechanisms“.

During the Second World War, already exiled in London, Anna Freud founded the Hampstead nurseries where she studied children separated from their families; The result of these studies were hers two works “War and children” and “Infants without families“, written together with Dorothy Burlingham and in which she talks about the emotional impact of mother-child separation.

Other publications of Anna Freud are:

1 “On the fact of losing and being lost“,

2- “Normality and pathology in childhood“.

In 1950, Anna Freud traveled to Clark University, where his father had also been invited years before, where he gave a lecture entitled “The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Genetic Psychology“, and she was honored as Doctor Honoris Causa.
The honors and recognitions continued in subsequent years, and thus she also received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa for the Universities of Víena, Columbia, Harvard and Frankfurt.

Anna Freud death was on October 9, 1982 in London, the city where she lived since her departure from Vienna because of the persecution of Nazism.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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Latah syndrome

What is Latah?

Latah is a syndrome first described in Malaya that occurs mostly in middle-aged women or elderly women. Latah has been known for many centuries and regarded more as an eccentricity than a disease.

The patients become increasingly fearful and seclusive and may repeat some of his own words (echolalia) ; later on, he will repeat the words on sentences of other people. At first they utters incomprehensible sounds, which later clearly obscene or curse  words which he never  used before (coprolalia).

Similar syndromes have been describes in Siberia, Japan, Philippines, Madagascar, and Congo under different names.

(Edited by María Moya Guirao, MD)

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