Henry Massie’s Published Works
The Boy Who Took Marilyn to the Prom is a work of fiction. Two events inspired the book: Near the end of her life Marilyn Monroe’s last psychiatrist tried to save her from depression by welcoming her into his home to give her a family life which she had never had…
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…
How children internalize emotional neglect has been largely understood from reconstructions during psychoanalytic treatment. This paper describes the psychic internalization of maltreatment on the basis of data from a prospective study of emotional development begun in 1964 with 125 infants and followed to age 30. In 2025, 4 participants have now been followed to age 58. To access the paper, Google: “A Psychoanalytic Prospective Study of Emotional Deprivation from Infancy to Middle Age, Henry Massie”. To read the abstract, click below on “Read more”.
A French friend gave me Sebastian Steiger’s remarkable World War II memoir—available only in French and German. I arranged for the memoir’s translation into English by Jocelyn Hoy, its American publication, and contributed a preface…
The ADS Scale is a one-page tool for quickly assessing parent and child interaction in the first years of life in mildly stressful situations (such as well baby pediatric examinations, leave taking and reunions at day care, and bathing and drying off)…
Ten children in the Lives Across Time study suffered severe maltreatment in childhood. As 30 year old adults they had significantly more psychiatric illness (typically joylessness, depression and anxiety), less mature psychological defense mechanisms, more insecure mental representations of attachment to their parents, and impaired overall functioning compared to well-treated children in the study…
My mother fled the Nazis twice. She left her village on the Polish-Russian border as a young woman in the 1930s for France because Nazi inspired laws took away all opportunities for her, and then fled France for British Mandate Palestine…
Early in my career treating children, families with autistic children gave me their home movies to study for clues to when and how the condition began. This led to a project in which I collected a large series of movies of the first two years of life of children who were later diagnosed with autism and pervasive developmental disorders, and for comparison sake a like number of movies of the infancies of school children without difficulties…