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A central premise of child psychoanalytic technique is the value of verbalization. Helping children to mentally represent and put into words their fantasies and feelings helps them organize their inner world
and make their feelings and fantasies seem less frightening and more manageable. Many have marveled at the extent to which very young children, after a period of analysis, can become expert observers of themselves and their feelings; their capacity to verbalize and label their feelings often falls little short of that seen in adults. When I hear a four-year-old reflect that “funny, sometimes I don't want to come and sometimes I don't want to leave,” I quickly see he recognizes his own feelings and has some understanding of an inner struggle. Comments like “Do you love me? Oh, love is stupid” convey intense feelings, fears of rejection, and a defensive process. As early as 1961, Anny Katan suggested that a child's capacity to label and verbalize feelings aids the child in the control and modulation of affect. A year later, Sandler and Rosenblatt (1962) put the concept of the representational world on the psychoanalytic map. They thought that the concept mental representation would be a way of conceptualizing the process whereby the child constructs an inner world from outer experiences. By forming mental representations, the child can organize, structure, and think about in a meaningful way a sense of self, a sense of the other, and the roles of the self and the other in interaction.
Peter Fonagy and his colleagues take the notion of verbalizing affects and the concept of mental representation to a new level with their significant new contribution to the field, Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self. They state that their aim is to establish “a new direction for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy” (p. 2). They also aspire to bring psychoanalysis out of the dark ages of isolationism and to bring research and theory from other fields to be