From Social Withdrawal Behavior to Shared Pleasure

Presented by Professors Kaija Puura and Antoine Guedeney

This webinar was presented live on Wednesday October 4th, 2023 at 4pm US Eastern time. Through the kindness of the presenters, a recording of the webinar is available here

Professors Kaija Puura and Antoine Guedeney

As clinicians and professors of child and adolescent psychiatry we are interested in ‘What Works for Whom’ about infants, parents, children and adolescents. Our work is to screen, to assess, to diagnose, aiming at intervening as soon as possible, planning an intervention scheme built within a working alliance with parents. We are not theoreticians, but we need a sound theory of development and psychopathology to achieve these goals. What we jointly present here is some 20 years of clinical research on an understudied dimension of early development, i.e. Sustained Social Withdrawal Behavior on one hand and Shared Pleasure and synchronization on the other. We believe that these two ends of the same dimension play a key role in the development of intersubjectivity in the first 3 years of life.

Kaija Puura, (born 1961) MD., Ph.D is Professor of Child Psychiatry in Tampere University, Finland, and Chief Physician in the Department of Child Psychiatry in Tampere University Hospital. She has authored or co-authored over 90 peer reviewed articles, chapters in both national and international books on assessment and treatment of young children. Her current research projects focus on developing new child psychiatric interventions combining digital technology with existing services. She is the Executive Director of the World Association for Infant Mental Health.

Antoine Guedeney (born 1953) MD., Ph.D is a Child Psychiatrist, Co-founder of the French Marcé Society, of the university diplomas of Attachment and Perinatal Psychopathology, and is married to Nicole Guedeney. He is Full Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2000-2022), emeritus since 2022, and Head of Perinatal Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 18th district of Paris Hospital Bichat Claude Bernard APHP. He is also Editor in Chief of ‘Devenir’ Medicine et Hygiene Geneva, since 1989, and developer of the Alarm Distress scale ADBB and the Modified ADBB. His website is Échelle ADBB et M-ADBB: www.echelle-adbb.fr.

A recording of the webinar is available here