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In your article ‘Studies in passivity’ you describe how the material of your homosexual patients shifted from a vicarious gratification of their phallic strivings through identification with their homosexual partner's masculinity to phallic narcissistic derivatives in the patient's own development. Was it possible for these patients to move beyond the stage of phallic narcissism into the object centred phallic oedipal stage?
Obviously, the homosexual patients I treated were not numerous enough to give my observations general validity. I can only say that, so far as my experience during the analytic treatment and after its conclusion was concerned, a full emotional relationship to a heterosexual object made its appearance. There was no sign that its quality was that of the phallic stage before full oedipal engagement.
In the context of your paper ‘Acting out’, is there anything that the child analyst learns from a small child's reliance on action that is not represented or is unavailable in the free association of adult patients?
We all know of course that the patients’ acting in child analysis is a very poor substitute for the free association of adult patients. With the latter, the emphasis is on the ‘free’, namely that the flow of verbal associations should proceed, absolutely unrestricted by the analyst's intervention and only affected by the patient's own internal resistances. In contrast, the child's action can never be altogether free. There will always be a point where the child analyst has to restrain him to avoid happenings which would have to be classed as seductive, or which would damage either the child himself or the analyst's own person, or the objects in the surroundings.
You ask, however, whether there is not also something to be learnt from action in the analytic situation. I suppose in the course of time we have all been struck by the preponderance of aggression in the child's behaviour in the analytic situation in gener