Neuropsychological function in a child with 18p deletion syndrome: a case report.

We report the neuropsychological profile of a 4-year-old boy with the rare 18p deletion syndrome. We used a battery of standardized tests to assess his development in intellect, language, visuomotor integration, academic readiness, socialization, and emotional and behavioral health. The results showed borderline intellectual function except for low average nonverbal reasoning skills. He had stronger receptive than expressive language skills, although both were well below his age group. He had impaired visuomotor integration and pre-academic skills such as letter identification. Emotional and behavioral findings indicated mild aggressiveness, anxiety, low frustration tolerance, and executive function weaknesses, especially at home. Interestingly, he showed social strengths, responding to joint attention and sharing enjoyment with his examiner. With its assessment of development in many domains, this case report is among the first to characterize the neuropsychological and psychiatric function of a young child with 18p deletion syndrome. We discuss the implications of our findings for clinical practice.

Words and transitional phenomena in psychotherapy.

In analytic psychotherapy, language provides form for the patient's conscious and unconscious material. Therefore, language creates a space for patient expression and a medium for therapeutic work. The space of language in analytic therapy is comparable to Winnicott's transitional space. The transitional space of language is independent of the number of languages the patient uses in therapy but transitional space of language is made particularly manifest during the moments of language switch Paying close attention to language switch during therapy may reveal the transitional space of language, the special words with transitional object qualities and, finally, the symbolic functions of language.

Complementary dreams: a window to the subconscious processes of countertransference and subjectivity.

The British psychoanalysts were the first to be interested in reciprocal and interpersonal interactions of psychotherapy. The Freudian mirror model was progressively questioned in the 1940s and 1950s. Throughout the 1950s, positions and terms were created that either defended or attacked the use of subjectivity and countertransference in psychodynamic psychotherapy. The objective of this article is to discuss the participation of the therapist's subconscious mind, as it is involved in communication with the patient's subconscious mind during psychodynamic treatment. Specifically, this takes the form of complementary dreams, a clinical phenomenon that I will describe as secondary to the therapist identification with the patient infantile object relations. Complementary dreams will be discussed as a helpful therapeutic tool used to understand the subjective communication that happened between patient and therapist in two separate cases. Complementary dreams will be presented as a helpful therapeutic instrument in containing countertransference enactment.

The experience of borderline phenomena through cinema: Guentin Tarantino's Reservoir dogs, true romance, and pulp fiction.

The experience of many patients with borderline personality is intense and kaleidoscopic. These qualities may be represented in film in ways that reflect and convey their essential features that are less readily captured in words. Quentin Tarantino has produced a trilogy of films that bring to light and to life the borderline experience. We use these movies to illustrate and discuss five key borderline themes: the fluid nature of drive derivatives, the discontinuous experience of time and space, the coniflicted search for an idealized parent, antisocial distortions of the superego, and the organizing and stabilizing function of a central romantic fantasy.