Reflective Network Therapy: An Approach for Autistic and Special Needs Preschoolers

Gilbert Kliman, M.D.: Greetings. I'm Gilbert Kliman, a 94-year-old child psychiatrist, child analyst, and public health minded researcher. I'm so pleased to spend a day with colleagues and citizens at Reiss-Davis teaching about an in-classroom treatment method which can literally revolutionize the difficult and usually costly and often inadequate treatment of special needs preschoolers. I have been training, supervising, and researching the work of over 30 teams, using the method called Reflective Network Therapy throughout North and South America. My colleagues and I have been helping preschoolers overcome post-traumatic stress disorders and helping autistic preschool children join the social world. We will see parent-permitted video recordings of in-classroom Reflective Network Therapy of traumatized preschoolers and autistic preschoolers. Objective psychometric evidence from third-party psychologists will be presented. The results are amazing. Seen on video recordings and in the psychometric data, public school budgets, suffering children and families, and society in general can benefit from this application of child psychoanalysis in the real-life educational community space. Childhood is the place in which adult disorders originate. But child therapy is relatively rare and child psychoanalysis is even more rare.