What becomes of infantile traumatic memories? An adult "wild child" is asked to remember.

A severely traumatized child, acting like a wild animal, was removed from her parents at thirteen months of age when her three-week-old sister was found, bitten and shaken to death. (Her father was later convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned.) The older child was also covered with bite marks.

Treating childhood trauma.

This review begins with the question "What is childhood trauma?" Diagnosis is discussed next, and then the article focuses on treatment, using 3 basic principles-abreaction, context, and correction. Treatment modalities and complications are discussed, with case vignettes presented throughout to illustrate. Suggestions are provided for the psychiatrist to manage countertransference as trauma therapy proceeds.

Five analogies between a King's Speech treatment and contemporary play therapies.

Objective: Psychiatric patients frequently respond positively to play therapy, which may rely on psychoanalytic, Jungian, cognitive-behavioral, familial, school-based, or other theories. I wished to determine if there were unifying principles that tie together these various types of play treatments.

Methods: The fact-based film, The King's Speech, vividly illustrates play utilized by Lionel Logue in his speech treatment (1926-1939) of the future King of England.

Using context to treat traumatized children.

When treating childhood psychic trauma, context means "putting a perspective to the terrifying experience"--"seeing it in a new light", one might say, or understanding its magnitude and meaning. Of three essential mechanisms behind a young person's psychological recovery from a stress disorder--abreaction, context, and correction-context is the most reflective, cognitive, and conscious of these processes; while abreaction is primarily emotive, and correction is primarily behavioral (involving real or fantasied action). Because context, newly introduced by this author to the psychiatric literature (Terr, 2003), is the most recent and the least well understood of the three mechanisms, it will be the sole focus here.

Children's turn-arounds in psychotherapy: the doctor's gesture.

Unlabelled: Over the past year, a number of us have been examining the organizing principles behind dramatic turning points in the psychotherapies of children. We wondered whether any particular techniques or occurrences in therapy promoted childhood change.

Method: One of us (L.

"Wild Child": how three principles of healing organized 12 years of psychotherapy.

Methods of conducting psychotherapy in the most severe forms of childhood posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), especially in those traumas discovered very early in life, are rarely reported. This paper presents such a report and in the process emphasizes three elements of treatment: abreaction (full emotional expression of the traumatic experience), context (understanding and gaining perspective on the experience), and correction (finding ways personally or through society to prevent or repair such experiences). With traumatized children, all three elements may be inserted into their therapeutic play, art, and/or talk.