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A lot of the temporary goals that we establish are merely means; we confuse them. Making the unconscious conscious is not, as far as I am concerned, a goal in and of itself. It's a means toward the aim of achieving some kind of therapeutic goal for an individual. If one keeps clear that the goal of analysis is not to get everything out on the surface but merely to help with whatever developmental problems there are to allow a person to mature in some normal way, one doesn't get into the binds that Dr. S. Spiegel was talking about.
A more basic position seems to be that analysis is an inquiry. Language may be one of the ways in which preconception gets in the way but I think that the other idea that comes through to me is that preconception should be left out and that the inquiry is what's important and that's what analysis should be about.
I am puzzled about this whole issue of the specific analysis of transference in the analyses of children. Up until about ten years ago there was a tremendous controversy about whether or not transference really occurred in the analyses of children, and it made for all kinds of theoretical problems and disputes. What I'm inclined to think is that one does analyze things that come up, but it is some thing that happens with that analytic work that was done with these patients between the time they were children and the time they come again as adults. I'm not trying to defend the very obsessessional or unfeeling work that's done with children and adults. Recently I've noticed one thing with one of my child patients that I found very interesting. She's ten years old and has been in treatment for three years. She's a very brilliant child, and she still sucks her thumb. "I've been reading Dr. Bettelheim's book and he had very interesting things to say about the thumb, " says she at a session last week,