Psychoanalytic Intervention with Children

MANY PATIENTS WE SEE have had previous experience in analysis or psychotherapy. Some of them have been treated as children before reaching adolescence. It is this population that I wish to talk about. When working with patients who have had prior experience in psychotherapy, it is important to know the details

of that experience, and in the course of treating adults we often note certain patterns in those who were analyzed as children which hamper their adult functioning. It is easy to say that this is the result of faulty child analysis. However, it is my contention that while the prior analysis may indeed have been deleterious, such effects are not the result of incompetence but the result of a basic theoretical error in the analysis of children.

In the development of psychoanalysis an attempt has been made to adhere to psychoanalytic theory in our work with children. Such theory is adaptable and useful in understanding children, but psychoanalysis as a treatment technique, as now practiced, is more clearly applicable to adults.

Experienced child psychoanalysts most often maintain the view that work with the child is essentially psychoanalysis as practiced with adults, and that to perform psychoanalysis with the child, one must alter technical devices rather than basic psychoanalytic method. One might ask at this point, "How many technical devices can we alter and still consider that the form of treatment is psychoanalysis?" There is a kind of quasiadherance to "the psychoanalytic method" which makes one apologize for modifications rather than accept them and fully comprehend their function and purpose. To adhere to the view that treatment should be the same as psychoanalysis with adults but adapted to children—a view I disagree with—the use of such devices as play materials, parent consultation, participation in activities with the child, all variations of basic psychoanalytic technique, are designed to interpret transference and to provide the youngster