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This paper gives an account of the first year of work with a 4- to 5-year-old boy, John. I began working with him when he was nearly four years old, for an hour a day, four times a week. He was then attending the Centre's Nursery School, and I saw him in a room on the Nursery premises for a year. After that, we moved to our own treatment room. This was mainly because John would soon be leaving the Nursery and moving on to primary school, and as his relationship with me would still continue, it seemed important that he see me as someone altogether separate and distinct from the Nursery. Though John and I have now been working together for more than two years, the focus of this paper is on this early phase of treatment.
There is a voluminous amount of case material and I have therefore chosen to concentrate on one important aspect of the early treatment: that of mastery through verbalization. I shall illustrate how, through the verbalization of affects, wishes and feelings (both his and others’), John was assisted in the management of his behaviour and the anxieties underlying it.
At this point it seems useful to recall some well-known matters: the gradual shift from action to words that starts early in the second year of life; the acquisition of control over action, and the management of feeling by a transition from dominance by words to dominance by thought; the vital importance of the role of the parents in all of this; and the initial acquisition of speech as the child is spoken to by the primary caretaker - the mother - through the labelling of objects and the identification of feelings and needs. The child will normally begin to internalize all this and take into himself his mother's part in these exchanges (Furman, 1978), her show of pleasure and encouragement, and