Panel Presentation:
• Starting Violence Prevention from Birth-Three: Judith Kestenberg’s Nonverbal Approach
Panelists: Susan Loman, K. Mark Sossin, and Janet Kestenberg Amighi
(120 min)
Abstract:
Historically there has been violence all around us, even now. Our own government is modeling validation for cruelty, hate, and toxic aggression. Trying to create healthy ways to express disagreement is increasingly challenging. How were these seeds of violence created? Our framework, anchored in original contributions in the arenas of developmental processes, nonverbal behavior, and Holocaust/trauma studies by the psychiatrist/ psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg, MD, provides a path toward greater understanding of the roots of violence.
In the 1970’s, Kestenberg created a Center for Parents and Children, which became a community-based epicenter of study, training, and implementation of newly developed “primary prevention” approaches to facilitate optimal mental health and relational outcomes for caregivers and children during the first four years of life. The goals were to promote harmonious family communication, empathy, community spirit, trust, predictability, sharing, and channeling of aggression into creative and non-destructive outlets. Kestenberg believed that infants and young children have forms of aggression demonstrated in developmental growth phases such as biting during teething, having temper tantrums and hitting out, grabbing from others, crashing and ramming into people and objects, to name a few. These developmental movement patterns that start out as typical can easily transform into violent behaviors if encouraged and not tamed into commensurate forms of aggression that are socially acceptable, and in fact contribute to positive personality acquisitions such as self-confidence, decisiveness, and determination.
At the Center, psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, and creative arts therapists worked with families toward the prevention of interpersonal violence before it started. Many creative and age-appropriate interventions, moored in Kestenberg’s rich and integrated developmental theory, were devised and rendered within group activities, and modeled for caregivers during art, music, dance, free play and gross-motor activities. While Kestenberg’s approach drew on a complex system for finding meaning in nonverbal/movement behavior, the result was a demystification of developmental phases and crises and arrived at practical and creative solutions focusing on nonverbal communication. Parents learned nonverbal methods for beneficially meeting the bodily and emotional states of their children, promoting improved self-regulation and enhanced experiences of mutuality. Laying ground for sharing and perspective-taking (mentalization): channeling anger into high intensity singing, drumming, and/or an angry dance; or biting a biting toy instead of people, are examples of the many hands-on techniques used at the Center.
The panelists, who were each at the Center as staff and participants, will present on the premises, methods, and integrations woven into the Center experience, attendant to implications for challenges faced today, with special focus on approaches to violence prevention in children, alongside strategies for building empathy, trust, secure attachment, resiliency, healthy nonviolent communication and coping strategies. We will trace how the absence of early prevention, or intervention when needed, opens pathways to abuse, callousness, a disregard for human dignity, and impediments to moral development. In this current cycle of violence, the panelists encourage collective healing that starts with the youngest members of society.
Keywords: aggression, caregiver-child relationships, early childhood, Judith Kestenberg, nonverbal communication, primary prevention, psychohistory, violence prevention
Panel Presentation 1:
The Center for Parents and Children, Movement Patterns in Development, and the Ascendance of Morality
By K. Mark Sossin
Abstract:
The Center for Parents and Children served as an arena for implementation and furtherance of Kestenberg’s prescient developmental and body-movement theories, all of which anticipated current developmental neuroscience’s focus on security of attachment, improved caregiver responsivity, heightened empathy, emotion regulation and impulse control. Facilitating optimal attunement, and preventing excessive mis attunement, provides the underbelly for healthy superego development. Individual moral development augments conscience as an internalized protection, and diminishes its vulnerability to become persecutory, which would amplify reactive destructiveness. The Center’s model operated on individual, dyadic, and group/community levels. Developmental needs for separation, exercised in clashing muscle tension were respected as per phase developmental steps, and narcissistic injuries were minimized, preventing their unfolding in personality as imperious traits. Recognition of a young child’s wants and wishes was balanced with clear, consistent and non-malicious limits. The Center enhanced opportunities to grow conscience through the ego-ideal, aspiration, and identification. Even at the body level of whole body vs. body part, adult staff modeled commitment, dependability, dedication, effective support and trustworthiness.
This Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP) template further attended to the minimizing of shame and humiliation, and the maximizing of virtue in community standards, interpersonal repair of ruptures, and emotionally resonating communal support for perspective taking, regret, and reparation. Hence, the arena for repair was often the community circle, modeling benevolence, forgiveness, and justice. The Center exemplified a moral civic structure. Violence prevention requires minimization of traumatization, rage, and despair, maximizing the experience of being known and valued. Development can be promoted through a steady climbing of the symbolic ladder, exercised in play, and reinforced in bibliotherapy, creative art endeavors, the mastery of nonviolent aggression, manifest in redirection of anger, allowing safe release, alternatives to revenge and force-upon-another, and access to developmentally-apt communication tools, both nonverbal and verbal. Through Center applications, vulnerabilities to retaliatory, cruel, fear-based, and annihilating violence could be replaced by the harnessing of superego building blocks of reparative guilt, reflectivity, social problem solving. Preventative methods are highly informed by the KMP as a backbone for facilitating interpersonal/interactive concordances, respect for temperamental differences, refinement of healthy defenses, and promotion of an optimal degree of intrapersonal harmonies among drive-, ego-adaptive- and relational-patterns. Foundations for moral development and violence prevention lie in infancy and early childhood.
Keywords: attachment security, early childhood, Kestenberg Movement Profile, moral development, nonverbal communication, psychohistory, superego development, violence prevention
Short Bio:
K. Mark Sossin, PhD, is Professor Emeritus/Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Pace University and former Director of the PhD Program in Clinical Psychology, Health Care Emphasis. He is a clinical psychologist; adult, child, and adolescent psychoanalyst; couples and infant-parent psychotherapist; Training Analyst and instructor at the Contemporary Freudian Society; and Clinical Faculty/Supervisor at the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, Adelphi University. He is co-author of The Meaning of Movement: Embodied Developmental, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives of the Kestenberg Movement Profile and co-editor of Healing After Parent Loss in Childhood and Adolescence and Mothers, Infants and Young Children of September 11, 2001: A Primary Prevention Project. He is Director of the Mind, Movement, Interaction, & Development (MMID) Research Group at Pace, where he pursues research in infancy, nonverbal behavior, applications of the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP), mind-body relations, ASD, trauma transmission, and the psychological impact of the Holocaust and state-sponsored genocide. Dr. Sossin is primarily located in Ontario, NY. He can be reached at .
Panel Presentation 2:
By Janet Kestenberg Amighi
Abstract:
Surrounded near and far by what feels like inexplicable violence not only in warfare but in one-to-one encounters, we struggle to understand. We address ourselves to the individual, familial, community, and institutional levels and still often feel lost. The difficulty of understanding is exacerbated by our inevitable view of others through the lens of our own individual experiences interpreted through our cultural lenses. It surrounds us like the air we breathe. Margaret Mead recommended viewing other cultural contexts as a preverbal child, discarding terminology and categories.
The Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP) approach invites us to do much the same through the medium of movement — both through observation and participation. We do not free ourselves entirely from our culture (for example Kestenberg retained her Freudian developmental perspective) but we renew our entrance into the world. One of the many discoveries was an understanding of aggression as not only an inner manifestation of externally performed violence, aimed at destruction, but aggression as the underpinnings of impactful behavior, assertiveness and self-confidence. It is therefore usefully distinguished from violence both theoretically and in our practical efforts to heal.
When I attended The Center for Parents and Children run by my mother, Judith Kestenberg, with my small children in the 1980s the two themes that I absorbed most deeply was the differentiation of aggression and violence and the importance of a “beloved” potentially healing community. Being an anthropologist means that I began to search the world and literature to see how different cultures and peoples deal with aggression versus violence and to what extent and in what forms they emphasize community to cope with and mitigate the negative impacts of aggression. In this paper I will focus on three cultures where I have lived: Long Island NY, Bali Indonesia and Tehran Iran, and discuss how they each navigated the issues of aggression vs. violence.
Keywords: aggression, anthropology, cultural lenses, healing community, Kestenberg Movement Profile, movement observation, psychohistory, violence
Short Bio: Janet Kestenberg Amighi is an anthropologist who has done research in cooperation with the Zoroastrians of Iran, Balinese of Indonesia, and Mexican mushroom workers in Pennsylvania. Her books include The Meaning of Movement: Embodied Developmental, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives on the KMP (ed.1 &2), with Susan Loman and K. Mark Sossin; The Zoroastrians of Iran: A History of Transformation and Survival, with Bahman Moradian). She can be reached at .
Panel Presentation 3:
By Susan Loman
Abstract:
This section of the panel will present a practical guide for applying Judith Kestenberg’s work with young children and caregivers. It is based on Kestenberg’s work at the Center for Parents and Children in Long Island, NY, and Loman’s work with that population at Antioch University New England in Keene, NH.
Some of the highlights of the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP) approach are: meeting the child’s developmental needs through pleasurable creative art modalities, channeling aggressive impulses into appropriate and interesting motor avenues, creating and maintaining a consistent holding environment that establishes a basic trusting relationship, and strengthening the family’s movement resources so they are better able to cope with the challenges they face.
This contribution will cover Kestenberg’s developmental phases through age three, presenting issues that are raised for both children and caregivers with examples of practical interventions. While going through typical growth phases, children undergo developmental crises such as sleeping issues, separations, tantrums, biting and a variety of frustrations. Kestenberg’s approach helped demystify these developmental issues with practical and creative solutions focusing on nonverbal communication.
Here are two examples of practical developmental issue interventions: What starts out as teething during the typical developmental phase we call, “biting” may escalate into undesirable behaviors such as biting people or oneself, hair pulling, scratching, and head banging. Children can be redirected into creative outlets using the same rhythm of biting but not used for violence towards others. They can tear paper, pull a doll’s hair, and bang on a drum. As preventative measures, during the biting stage, children were offered biting balls and were sung to when they began to show irritability from teething. If a child bit someone during the group, we provided an intervention within the group involving the whole community. We might do a role-play of what happened and sing a song about biting teething toys instead of people to alleviate anxiety and provide role modeling of non-harming biting. In the first year of life many important patterns are established. Issues of self-soothing, separation, asking for help, and building trust all originate during this phase.
At the end of the second year, children have difficulty during transitions or in letting go of objects or toys. They may try to grab another’s toys, hoard many toys, and scream “mine” or “no.” Sharing can be a challenge during this age. Games such as tug of war and holding on tight and relinquishing can assist a child in letting go. At this age children often use aggressive movements such as throwing, kicking, and pushing. They don’t have language to express themselves and thus demonstrate their feelings of anger. Setting boundaries may include using strength to pick up the child and channeling the aggression into pushing and kicking large therapy balls and throwing balls into a basket. Matching the child’s tension may include using a firm voice to say, “You’re very angry right now, but I won’t let you hit me.” In the community circle we would sing a song such as, “When your angry and you know it stamp the floor.”
Judith Kestenberg’s developmental rhythms provide the foundation for understanding the seeds of aggression through underlying motor qualities in children’s growth. Through the understanding of this predictable developmental sequence, caregivers can empathize with their children and build healthy communication patterns. They can follow the child’s lead and redirect their aggressive behaviors into satisfying and creative outlets rather than violent acts.
Keywords: aggression, early childhood, caregiver-child relationships, Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP), nonverbal communication, primary prevention, psychohistory, violence prevention
Short Bio:
Susan Loman, M.A., BC-DMT (Ret), NCC, KMP certified analyst, professor emeritus, Dir, MA program in DMT and counseling (1987–2017) Antioch University; ADTA approval committee (2014–16); Co-editor of American Journal of Dance Therapy (2011-2014); AJDT Editorial Board 2014 – present); Chair Education Committee ADTA (1995-1999); The Arts and Psychotherapy Editorial Board (1996-2011). Dance/movement therapist at Judith Kestenberg’s Center (1978-1987); Co-Author of The Meaning of Movement. KMP trainings were conducted in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Argentina, China, England, Scotland, South Korea, the Netherlands, and the United States. Director of the KMP committee. Susan Loman received the ADTA lifetime achievement award (2014), and the lifetime achievement award from the European Center for Dance Therapy (2017). She can be reached at .