1st Edition

Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis in Times of Crisis War, Pandemic and Climate Change

Edited By Kristin Fiorella Copyright 2026
320 Pages
by Routledge

320 Pages
by Routledge

320 Pages
by Routledge

Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis in Times of Crisis: War, Pandemic and the Climate Crisis gathers a global cohort of psychoanalytic thinkers to consider the most pressing issues currently faced by young people worldwide. Each chapter provides a theoretical exploration of our psychically and socially damaging collective reality and offers practical support to psychoanalysts working to... Read more

Foreword

Kristin Fiorella

Part One: War

Introduction

Kristin Fiorella

1. War, Trauma and the Survival of Hope in Palestine: What We Learn from its Children

Samah Jabr and Elizabeth Berger

2. Pour a Libation for Us: Restoring the Sense of a Moral Universe to Children Affected by Violence

Martha Bragin

3. Psychoanalytic Thoughts on Evacuated Parents and Children during the First Weeks of the October 7th War

Ruth Weinberg 

4.  Minds in the Line of Fire: Mothers During the War

Kateryna Abashkina, Kateryna Alpatova,Tetiana Stasiuk, Anastasya Svinarchuk, and Emanuela Quagliata

5.  Children in a World at War

Monica Cardenal

6. There’s a Hole in Daddy’s Arm: Making Contact with Opiod Epidemic in Clinical Practice

Ben Fife

7. Forbidden Games: Anti War Manifesto:

Ana Belchior Melicias

8. Totalitarian Regimes and a Child’s Mind: Cria Cuervos

Mary Brady, Ana Belchior Melicias, Virginia Unger, and Adriana Prengler

9. The Need for Truth in Healthy Psychic Development

Antonia Grimalt

 

Part Two: Pandemic

Introduction

Kristin Fiorella

10. Other Lullabies: Attacks on Blackness, Confusion of Tongues, and the Loss of Play

Carlos Padron

11. Caring for Cryptnids: Welcoming the More-Than-Human into Psychoanalytic Treatment

Kathleen Del Mar Miller

12.  Adolescents in the Line of Fire: Between Chaos, Ideals, and Psychic Reality Today in the Adolescent Subjectivation Process

Fernando Gomez

13. S.O.S. Brasil

Alicia Beatriz Dorado de Lisondo

14. On Psychic Envelopes and Spaces for Young Children during the Pandemic

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur

 

Part Three: Climate Change:

Introduction

Kristin Fiorella

15.  Eco-Anxiety in Children and Young People- A Rational Response, Irreconciliable Despair, or Both?

Caroline Hickman

16. The Climate Crisis and the “Unnatural” Body: Onto-epistemological Possibilities and Threats of the Genders of Children and Adolescents

Kristin Fiorella

17. Climate Anxiety, Maturational Loss, and Adversarial Growth

Panu Pihkala

18. Dwelling and the Climate Crisis: A Developmental Perspective and its Implications

Ryan Lamothe 

19. The Climate Crisis: The Impact of Fragile Identificatory Models on Adolescence

Christine Franckx

Biography

Kristin Fiorella, Psy.D., MFT, MFA, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in San Francisco. She is on the faculties of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.

‘Written for tumultuous times, this volume offers fresh and valuable psychoanalytic reflections on traumatized children’s play and on how wars/climate change/pandemics inflect psychic development. Breaking with psychoanalysis’s omertà around naming the genocide of Palestinian children and trans youth, Fiorella’s bold and erudite collection tracks fantasies about blown-off limbs growing back, impending disablements by climate change/pandemics, and trans children’s anxieties about being erased. It also necessarily reveals how adults fail children, children wounded not only by bombs, disease, and rising temperatures, but also by adults’ lies, greed, narcissism, and inaction. Never has Winnicott’s “there’s no such thing as a baby” been such a searing indictment.’

Avgi Saketopoulou, Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York, USA.

 

‘This is a powerful and precious book. The contributors have gone undaunted into the darkest of places and seen some terrible sights. Someone had to do it and thanks to these brave psychoanalysts, now someone has. They have much to teach us.’

 

Anne Alvarez, Consultant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, London, UK.

 

‘It is an essential task for psychoanalysis to contemplate the precarity of human existence in a world under threat of extinction, a pandemic, and endless wars. The social-political circumstances of our lives are as fundamental to who we are as the dynamics of our families of origins, doubly so when they are traumatic. This book explores the condition of the most vulnerable humans: children. It is written by people who have been meeting them in some of the most devastating trauma zones. It is a gift, and a demand that we pay close attention and do what we can.’

 

Eyal Rozmarin, psychoanalyst, New York, USA.