Draft:Moses Laufer

Born in Montreal, he shared Sigmund Freud's birthday of May 6 - a coincidence he discovered later on in life. His childhood and adolescence were marked by the great depression of the 1930s. He's described by friends as showing signs of a deeply caring personality from and early age, especially towards disadvantaged individuals. He was known for looking out for his young contemporaries, often bringing them home after an accident for his mother to look after.

He obtained an MSc in social work at McGill University, Montreal, followed by further studies at the Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio. He was then awarded a bursary by a Jewish foundation to work on a social project of his choice in Israel. He chose to help Indian children who had been sent to the country without their parents cope with the problems of integrating into the kibbutzim culture. It was also in Israel that he got involved with a child guidance clinic run by a psychoanalyst, and developed an interest in Freud's work and thinking.

Moe moved to London in 1955, and began training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. As a street youth worker in the East End, he was involved in a Nuffield Foundation project supporting disturbed and delinquent youngsters. He qualified as an analyst in 1960, and shortly afterwards completed his child and adolescent training at the Anna Freud Centre (Hampstead clinic). He subsequently became a full member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, chair of education and finally its president in the mid-1980s. He was secretary of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, and worked hard to raise the standards of training around the world.^[2]

He devoted his research mainly to the period of puberty and young adolescents. In 1976, he first defined the so-called central masturbatory fantasy.^[3] According to him, this is established within the Oedipus complex and is a kind of map of the sexual identification of the individual. The central masturbatory fantasy is, according to Laufer, superior to other masturbatory fantasies and plays a key role in adolescent development, especially in mentally unstable individuals, who have a central fantasy constructed differently than mentally healthy individuals. The central fantasies of healthy individuals are similar, the central masturbatory fantasy of a psychopathological individual is either completely individual (idiosyncratic) or fixed on some childhood experience (idiopathic). If the central fantasy is so pathological, individuals will inevitably reach a crisis point in adolescence, when they understand that their sexuality (and thus their entire personality) has no "natural solution" in social interactions, they feel frozen and unable to move from where they are, after which they are overwhelmed by a feeling of surrender. For these individuals, masturbation has a different function than for healthy adolescent, it is always a re-presentation of capitulation, it is associated with a feeling of surrender and humiliation. According to Laufer, such adolescents symbolically "surrender their body to the mother ", which means surrendering the body to pregenitality, i.e. perversion on the one hand, psychopathology on the other.

In 1984, he and his wife Eglé Laufer published the book Adolescence and Developmental Breakdown^[4], in which he further elaborated on the subject of the body in adolescence and human life in general. Here, he noticed that mentally ill individuals can indicate a very specific relationship to their body. They experience it as "the source and symbol of their abnormality". According to Laufer and Lauferová, the acceptance of an adult body image during puberty and early adulthood is not as self-evident as is generally believed. Most adolescents cling to a childish, immature, hairless body, but they usually reach a compromise - they accept the image of the mature body and mix it with certain aspects of the infantile body ideal. Mentally unstable individuals, however, never accept the image of the adult body ("into the subject"). The onset of physical puberty in them leads to the breaking of the mind -body connection, and thus to the gradual atrophy of subjectivity, or fragmentation of subjectivity (i.e. de facto to psychotic outbursts, the destructiveness of which depends on how well the Ego is built , the construction of which is not only related to sexuality, but also to aggression and the relationship with objects). The corrosion of subjectivity is also associated with attacks on and hatred of the rejected adult body - Laufer sees here the key to phenomena such as adolescent self-harm , anorexia , suicide attempts, etc.

In 1967, Moe, together with Egle Laufer, Mervyn Glasser, and Meyer Wohl, founded the Brent Consultation Centre and Centre for Research into Adolescent Breakdown, in the London Borough of Brent. The Centre was initially located on the top floor of a secondary school building known as Laufer House and operated as a walk-in service. With the support of Anna Freud, it received funding from an American foundation to support psychoanalytic clinical research alongside its clinical work. This research focused primarily on the psychoanalytic treatment of adolescents. The centre was one of the first free clinical walk-in services in London, specifically targeted at adolescents.

The Centre played a significant role in the development of psychoanalytic theories of adolescence, particularly through the work of Egle and Moses Laufer. Their contributions included the concepts of developmental breakdown in adolescence, later or secondary adolescent breakdowns linked to difficulties in assuming ownership of the body, research into adolescent suicide, and the role of central masturbation fantasies in problems of bodily integration.

For a period, the Brent Consultation Centre operated alongside the Centre for the Study of Adolescence as a single institution. During this time, a distinctive method for assessing and treating adolescents was developed, informed by psychoanalytic theory and techniques specific to this developmental phase. This approach was later named Adolescent Exploratory Therapy (AET) by Maxim de Sauma.

The Centre’s theoretical orientation was originally Freudian, drawing on the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and the Laufers’ work on adolescence. Over time, clinicians from a range of psychoanalytic traditions joined the Centre, contributing to a pluralistic clinical and theoretical environment.

As its work expanded, the organisation became known as the Brent Centre for Young People, which still operates from Laufer House. New services were introduced, including Schools and Outreach Services, a Young Offenders Service, a Private Service, and a Training Initiative, which includes training in Adolescent Exploratory Therapy.

• Adolescent Disturbance and Breakdown (1975), Moses Laufer
• Adolescence and Developmental Breakdown (1984), Eglé Laufer and Moses Laufer
• Developmental Breakdown and Psychoanalytic Treatment in Adolescence: Clinical Studies (1989) Eglé Laufer and Moses Laufer
• The Suicidal Adolescent (1995), Moses Laufer
• Adolescent Breakdown and Beyond (1997), Moses Laufer