On Being an Analyst of Children and Adults

I have been asked to contribute some thoughts on the comparative experience of being a child analyst and an adult analyst, moving as I did originally from working with children to adults and not, as is often the case with those who have written on the subject, from adults to children. When I was first approached to write this I thought it would be possible to describe - in a simple linear progression - my experience of moving from one to the other and how I thought working first with children had contributed to and enriched my work with adults. However, this idea of a smooth temporal progression - as tempting and simple as it seemed at first to be - did not correspond to the reality of my experience. Not surprisingly, the reason for this lay in the fact that my manner of working with both children and adults had undergone considerable changes over the years. These inevitable, organic changes that spring from one's personal development and result in a clinical style compatible with one's own personality, form a normal and natural part of becoming a psychoanalyst, and in my case a subtle system of mutual influence - from children to adults, but also from adults to children - has been built up over the years, making it impossible to carry out my original plan. Surprisingly, an additional problem arose from the fact that, having changed my country and my language, I went through a relatively long period in which I worked only with adults; so that when I resumed treating children this work was most certainly influenced by the experience I had gained in working with adults with severe ego disturbances. It was, too, an interesting and unexpected experience to discover that I could work with adults in German far sooner than I could with children. Perhaps I was especially naive to think, as I did, that one can speak to children in a foreign language sooner than to adults. On the contrary, I discovered that my English accent and my grammatical errors made me much too strange