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This volume of Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, the sixty-second, celebrates the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud. Like its predecessors, the volume is filled with scholarly and clinically arresting contributions from psychoanalysts across the nation and from the U.K. Its opening essay, a preface by Samuel Abrams, offers a detailed theoretical review of the developmental principles that have been central to psychoanalytic theory almost from the beginning. He draws also on the rich literature of academic developmental science to show the binding wisdom that has emerged from the work of developmentalists of every stripe. He advocates a constructivist approach that reaches forward from both Sigmund and Anna Freud, while at the same time he recounts the obstacles to clarity that arise from the special circumstances of the clinical perspective and the complexity of integrating data from extraclinical sources.
The larger text making up the volume pulls the reader back into history even as it reaches toward the future. A tacit theme that can be extracted from the articles presented concerns an early expansion of technique and theory followed by a period of cautious conservatism. Most recently there has been a new wave of application and expansion of psychoanalytic theory and practice to institutional work and the care of abused and indigent children, reflected in a literature with a firmer developmental base.
The volume features a special section on the Little Hans case, first published in 1909, that reconsiders the landmark analysis of a young child by Freud through the boy's father. The case was Freud's first opportunity to explore and verify his view that there is no adult neurosis without a childhood neurosis and to witness symptom formation during childhood in statu nascendi using his ideas about the centrality of the nuclear conflict, the oedipal constellation. This case, well known and often reconsidered, is now reexamined in light of n