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Herbert Waldhorn pointed out that in the recent past psychoanalysis had mainly been concerned with the inevitability of neurotic conflict and the great complexity of overdetermination in mental functioning; consequently, the problem of the prevention of mental illness has seemed "awesomely unapproachable." However, with the recent advances in our knowledge of early psychic functioning deriving from both clinical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic research in childhood, the time has come to attempt to rethink the problem.
To illustrate this change in point of view, he quoted Anna Freud from her Arden House talk in 1954, in which she stated that the emergence of neurotic conflicts had to be regarded as the price paid for the complexity of the human personality. In 1957, however, in her paper on "Child Observation and the Prediction of Development, " she paid tribute to the late Ernst Kris's ideas about prediction and the early spotting of danger, adding that prevention was feasible only if we could know the therapeutic steps which are appropriate to each age level and its disturbances, and to each special group of disorders. The new knowledge, which Kris had stressed and which now made such an approach to prevention possible, consists in the awareness of the mother's unique role in human life, the adaptive value of psychic conflict and function, the interaction of libidinal and aggressive drives, and the phase-specific and situation-specific mechanisms of defense.
In September, 1960, Anna Freud gave her revisions of her contributions to child analysis. She proposed a new method of diagnosis in childhood, which would be concerned with the assessment of lines of development, rather than with symptom formation, levels of achievement in the ego, or instinctual phase. She discussed the importance of progressive and regressive trends and again raised the possibility of developing specifically appropriate types of treatment and preventive intervention. It is time, Waldhor