Creating a 'social zeitgeber' to synchronize family emotional rhythms: A new therapeutic approach in child and adolescent psychiatry.

A family can be viewed as a system respecting the principle of homeostasis and therefore considered as a system in equilibrium or out of equilibrium, or even both simultaneously or consecutively. Within a family system, there are oscillatory phenomena and synchronization of the emotional, behavioral and relational rhythms of each member of the family system as well as synchronization of this system with others. A disruption of family synchronies, consisting of successive desynchronizations and resynchronizations, can take place in order for a change to occur. We created a mobile team for preadolescents and adolescents with psychological difficulties and their families; this mobile team enables to trigger a change by acting on the family synchronies like a 'social zeitgeber', i.e. an external factor synchronizing social and biological rhythms. The mobile team acts by disrupting the synchronies of the family system and this disruption is facilitated by a state of crisis experienced by the family. More specifically, the mobile team intervention provokes changes in the family representations associated with changes in the family emotional climate, measured by expressed emotion, due to disruptions in the synchronization of certain rhythms (desynchronization and then resynchronization of these rhythms), and could therefore be considered as a 'social zeitgeber'. It creates an experience that becomes part of the individual's and family's history and could be reactivated in the future if necessary. Finally, it allows the family and the adolescent with difficulties to reach new perspectives and representations which participates to the process of change, but also to benefit at the same time from a secure basis and frame created by the (re)synchronization of family emotions through the intervention of the mobile team following a ritualized procedure.

A historical perspective on the collaboration between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

The aim of this article is to present and discuss the connections between psychoanalysis and neuroscience from a historical viewpoint. We start by examining how Sigmund Freud can be viewed as a pioneer in the interaction between these two fields. Freud was himself a neurologist and had maintained an interest in biology as he developed the key concepts of psychoanalysis. His ideas regarding psychosomatics are described. We will also explore how the concept of drive is essential to the connection between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Then, we describe several key actors and historical events and characters at the interface of these two fields, namely Sándor Radó Lawrence S. Kubie and Mc Culloch, the debates that took place during the Macy conferences, as well as the positions of Jacques Lacan, George L. Engel, and Eric Kandel. Finally, we present a synthesis of the main fields in which the connections between psychoanalysis and neuroscience are already fruitful, and those where they should be developed: the classification of mental diseases, the link between the scientific and psychic dimensions, therapeutics, the organization of the body, intersubjectivity, the subjective division and ambivalence, as well as transferential effects like such as the placebo and nocebo effects. In the conclusion, we advocate several strategic alliances and underscore the complementarity between rigorous scientific experimentation and the individualized psychoanalytic approach.