Judith Kestenberg

Judith Ida Kestenberg (née Silberpfennig; 17 March 1910 in Tarnów, Austria-Hungary – 16 January 1999 in Sands Point, New York) was a child psychiatrist who worked with Holocaust survivors.

She founded the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children (ISOPC) an organization that coordinated the psychologically informed interviews of over 1500 child survivors throughout much of the world.

She was also the lead creator of the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP), used to create a psychological profile based exclusively on movement patterns.

Kesteneberg grew up in a wealthy Jewish industrialist family in Kraków, who moved in 1924 from Poland to Vienna in 1924.

She studied medicine at the University of Vienna and specialized in neurology and psychiatry.

After receiving her doctorate in 1934 she began training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and in 1937 undertook a training analysis with Eduard Hitschmann.

Concerned with the persecution of the Socialist Party of which she was a member, and interested in continuing her studies, Kestenberg emigrated in 1937 to New York City, where she worked with Paul Ferdinand Schilder at Bellevue Hospital in child psychiatry.

For her psychoanalytic training Kestenberg studied at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and continued with Hermann Nunberg, who had also emigrated to escape the Anschluss.

In 1942, Kestenberg married the lawyer Milton Kestenberg (1913-1991), who had left Poland in 1939.

They had two children.

She was Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine and also worked at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center.

Kestenberg has published seven books and over 150 journal articles.

Kestenberg, like other child psychiatrists, confronted the challenge of analyzing and helping very young children who had limited verbal skills.

With her background in neurology, she believed that how a child moved could be a window into the child's ways of feeling and thinking.

In 1943 she became a member and training analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

Kestenberg began research in the early 1950s with the systematic observation of infants and their movement patterns.

Through contact with Maria Ley-Piscator she learned the technique of Laban movement studies as it applied to questions in developmental psychology.

She also began a long distance correspondence course with Warren Lamb (a student of Laban) in England to learn more about movement study.

In 1976, Kestenberg and her colleague Arnhilt Buelte opened the Center for Parents and Children in Port Washington, New York.

(The center later moved to Roslyn, New York.) There, parents and children from birth to four years of age gathered to play and learn in a developmentally informed environment.

Parents were able to meet and bond with other parents and children, creating long-lasting communities and friendships.

But the principal purpose of the center was primary prevention.

Psychiatrists, dance movement therapists and other professionals led the parents and children in play formulated to enhance and reinforce natural developmental patterns.

The staff worked with parents to help prevent development disorders and resolve everyday issues.

The center was also a place where the Kestenberg Movement Profile was used to help with assessment.

Interns worked with the children and made movement profiles of mothers and children to inform work with children and parents.

Based on movement understandings, they developed a method of movement retraining in order to support movement development and the interactions between parent and child from infancy.

The original structure and focus of the Kestenberg Movement Profile was based on the metapsychological profile developed by Anna Freud, with its strong emphasis on development.

In 1980, Kestenberg invited psychiatrists and movement specialists to join with her in forming the Sands Point Movement Study group.

They observed infants in various nurseries and she also spent a summer observing infants and children in a kibbutz in Israel.

After many years of work, they developed the Kestenberg Movement Profile, a system of movement observation and analysis used to appraise individuals of all ages including the fetus.

The system consists of 63 movement qualities portrayed in two series of diagrams, System I and System II.

The System I diagrams focus on the feeling and substance of movement.

It includes a profile of temperament, learning styles, use of psychological defenses, cognitive patterns and ways of coping in space weight and time.

System II diagrams consist of movements that provide the structure and shape for System I qualities.

For example, if someone prefers to focus direct attention when they are studying or interacting with others, an enclosing gesture helps focus that direct attention.

As originally developed, profiles can trace the developmental foundation of movement and make psychological assessments that are psychodynamically informed.

Today, the KMP is still evolving, and has become an assessment and treatment guidance tool in the field of dance movement therapy.

It is also a resource for work in family systems and anthropology.

It continues to be studied and applied in Germany, South Korea, the UK, Italy, Switzerland, Argentina, the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States.