A psychological theory of child abuse

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Abstract
This paper presents a detailed study of two patients hospitalized in a closed psychiatric unit on which the treatment program emphasized dynamically oriented individual psychotherapy and family therapy. The first patient was hospitalized following physical abuse of her four-year-old daughter, while the second was hospitalized for a postpartum depression eight weeks following the birth of her first child, a girl. Although the presenting pictures in these two patients were markedly different, the psychodynamic patterns were so similar that a detailed comparison of the two cases seems to offer useful insight into some of the psychological causes of child abuse.

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