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Early childhood—or roughly the first five years of life—is cut off from normal recall by what has been called the “repression barrier.” The complexities involved in the formation of that barrier, on the way it functions, and their bearing on the nature and variety of unconscious mental processes both in childhood and in later life has been a major source of concern for psychoanalysts of both adults and children. The analytic study of child development has confirmed many earlier formulations, based on the study of adults, and added greatly to current knowledge. In this, the work of Anna Freud is of vital importance.
But the work has bristled with seeming difficulties. In this regard, Freud's own struggles reached a watershed with the theoretical and technical advances involved in the formulation of the structural model of the mind. Some apparent discrepancies between the new formulations and those of the topographical model have had repercussions that persist to this day. A growing number of “psychoanalytic psychologies,” many with their own concepts of the nature of what is “unconscious,” have led some to try to resolve anomalies and hold the psychoanalytic movement together on the basis of a hypothetical “common ground,” Of these, the formulations of George Klein, Robert Wallerstein and Joseph and Anne-Marie Sandler have attracted considerable attention. It is argued that none of these approaches add anything to what the mainstream of psycho-analytic thinking through Freud, Anna Freud, and others can supply. Special attention is given to a critique of the Sandlers' notion of a “past” and “present” unconscious, and the techniques derived from it—themselves seen as a threat to the continued existence of a truly psychoanalytic psychology and its clinical application.