Lives Across Time—Paths to Emotional Health and Emotional Illness from Birth to 30 in 76 People
Henry Massie and Nathan Szajnberg
Karnac Books, London, 2008. Newly reissued in print and as an eBook on Amazon and Apple books in 2021.
Lives Across Time is a longitudinal study of how children develop, beginning with their parents’ hopes and anxieties for them during pregnancy. Sylvia Brody, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, began the research in 1964, and with her team filmed babies with their mothers at intervals from infancy to age 5. They also continued in depth interviews with both parents and made periodic assessments of the children until they were 18. When Dr. Brody retired the project passed to me, and with Dr. Szajnberg and other collaborators we studied the now grown children at age 30, with interviews and psychological measures. For some of the children their early promise was born out, and others overcame severe family dysfunction and loss and were doing well at 30. But for others, emotional trauma and physical illness had bent the arc of normal emotional growth and they were hampered by psychological symptoms. The study shows the remarkable ways in which children strive to make the best life possible for themselves, and what kinds of care in early life enhances their resilience or impairs it.
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Robert Michaels, M.D., Walsh McDermott Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry, Cornell University, writes, “Lives Across Time is a momentous project. There are few long-term studies of individual lives, and fewer still that combine sophisticated psychological observations with psychoanalytic understanding and span the entire period from the earliest mother-infant relationship to adulthood.
Lenore Terr, M.D., author of Too Scared To Cry, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco, says of Lives Across Time, “A tremendous piece of work. Life-long stories are the best of stories.”