A Model for a Psychoanalytically Informed Preschool

ABSTRACT This paper is about my journey into unfamiliar territories as a child analyst when I was asked to direct a psychoanalytically oriented preschool project known as the Early Childhood Mental Health Program in a high-risk community in San Francisco. This ambitious project required knowledge of racial and class challenges and the way I approached it was to say: I am here to learn about you and your community. In the first six months, I sat in the classrooms and met with the director on a weekly basis. What follows is what I learned and how I think our mental health team was effective in having a strong therapeutic impact on the school environment, the teaching staff, and the families. By the third year of the project, the school environment was transformed into a growth-promoting, good-enough caregiving environment where attachment relationships developed between the children and the teaching staff. This model of early childhood mental health intervention/prevention in a high-risk community can be replicated in other public preschool settings. Even though, initially, this model requires significant funding, in the long run it is an economically advisable way to prevent a significant number of at-risk children from ending up in special ed programs or in the juvenile court system at great cost to the community and state.