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The purpose of this account is to give an impression of the Nursery School's flexible use of its resources to deal with the particular needs of a boy who was caught in the turmoil and tension of severe parental conflict. The case in question dates back a good number of years, to the time when Anna Freud was still an active participant at the Nursery School staff meetings.
In carrying out its primary educational task, the Nursery School encountered levels of distress and immaturity in this boy that required different forms of therapeutic intervention. The Nursery School provided many of the basic ingredients of such intervention. However, as these proved of themselves inadequate, special assistance was additionally provided within the context of the Nursery. This consisted in my forming an individual relationship with the boy, offering myself as a positive adult male with whom to identify. As the boy began to prepare for the transition from the Nursery School into primary school, this individual relationship was carried on in individual twice-weekly psychotherapy over a two-year period, alongside but separate from the Nursery School.
In an earlier paper (Wilson, 1977), I discussed the remedial and therapeutic function of the Nursery School and the question of assessment and referral for psychological treatment. In reviewing the children who had attended the Nursery School in the preceding ten years, I arrived at four main broad assessment categories. The first two concerned children whose behaviour and functioning indicated normal development: some predictably, others surprisingly in view of their families' circumstances. A third category included those children who showed signs of internalized disturbance and whose parents were agreeable to psychoanalytic treatment. A fourth group, however, included children whose development was not considered normal and who in our view were not ready for such treatment. These were children whose functioning in the Nursery School ref