This paper reviews the outcomes of psychodynamic psychotherapy (PP) for children and adolescents reported in papers identified by a comprehensive review of the literature on treatment evaluations of psychological and medical interventions for mental disorders in pediatric populations. The review identified 48 reports based on 33 studies. Reports were individually evaluated in terms of methodological rigor.Randomized trials, quasi-experimental and observational studies are considered separately. RCTs were independently rated on a 25-item scale of methodological strengths. Although a small number of studies with findings indicating beneficial effects of PP for pediatric mental disorder were identified, the review found no compelling evidence from RCT data supporting the use of PP as an individually delivered psychological therapy. In almost all the studies, when contrasted with family-based interventions, PP fares no better and appears to produce outcomes with some delay relative to family-based therapies. While the review shows PP to be an effective treatment, it is clearly understudied and its treatment principles may be most efficaciously delivered in non-traditional contexts such as parent-child or family therapy. Further rigorous evaluations are needed but evidence to date suggests that the context in which PP is delivered should be extended from the traditional context of individual therapy.2

This article first aims to demonstrate the different ways the work of the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson influenced Freud. It argues that these can be summarized in six points. It is further argued that the framework proposed by Jackson continued to be pursued by twentieth-century neuroscientists such as Papez, MacLean and Panksepp in terms of tripartite hierarchical evolutionary models. Finally, the account presented here aims to shed light on the analogies encountered by psychodynamically oriented neuroscientists, between contemporary accounts of the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system on the one hand, and Freudian models of the mind on the other. These parallels, I will suggest, are not coincidental. They have a historical underpinning, as both accounts most likely originate from a common source: John Hughlings Jackson's tripartite evolutionary hierarchical view of the brain.