Letters

August 29, 2000. In a recent article, Arnold Richards (1999) discusses the negative impact for psychoanalysis of the politics of exclusion. In his paper Richards himself, perhaps unwittingly, excludes from his consideration the exclusion of child psychoanalysis from mainstream psychoanalytic discourse. He has only one reference to child analysis, stating that “Brill [despite his opposition to nonmedical psychoanalytic practitioners] sent his two children, Edwin and Joia, to lay analysts for treatment” (p. 12).

It is striking how many analysts, including child psychoanalysts, “view child psychoanalysis as ‘derivative’ or ‘applied’ psychoanalysis” (Rosenblitt 2000) and omit child psychoanalytic insights from theoretical discussions. For example, there are virtually no references to the child analytic literature in the current psychoanalytic debate involving differences between the so-called one-person and two-person psychologies (Hoffman 1998), nor in Paul Gray's (1982, 1996) central contributions to the development of defense analysis with adults.

I would like to suggest that future clinical and theoretical psychoanalytic discussions take into account the seminal work of child psychoanalytic thinkers. For example, one might consider whether an early unacknowledged version of the one-person/two-person debate occurred in the 1920s, as child analysis was developing. Melanie Klein (1927) espoused the idea that in analytic work with children the child's relationship to the outside world was not significant, and thus reality issues and work with the parents were unnecessary and corrupting factors in a child's analysis. Anna Freud (1927) maintained, in contradistinction to Klein, the importance of the parents to the child, as superego figures and auxiliary ego figures. In her recommendations for analytic technique, she stressed that the analyst needed to form an alliance with the child so the child could trust the analyst, as well as estab