Technical Procedure in the Analytic Treatment of Children

In the early days of psycho-analysis its critics proclaimed and protested that the material which the analyst claimed to discover in his patients' minds was essentially the product of his own imagination. The psycho-analytic school really corroborated to a limited degree this contention when it began to insist that analysts themselves submit to analysis in order to clear up their own resistances to accepting some of the material spread before them by the patients, and to obviate as far as possible the unconscious projection of their own complexes upon the patients. This step to free the analyst of his own unconscious limitations was followed by another vital procedure in his training, namely, the control analysis, and with the introduction of the latter it has been reported by the controlling teachers that usually the novice sees only a repetition of the salient mechanisms of his own analysis in the first few cases he treats. The tendency to projection is therefore stubborn and persistent even after long analytic training, and is constantly in evidence in daily life, especially in the play, conversation and quarrels of children.

It is generally agreed by those who treat the problems of children on the basis of psycho-analytic interpretation that the ordinary technique of the recumbent position used with adults cannot be followed. Instead, it is customary for the analyst to rely upon the direct, usually artificial conversational or play approach in order to elicit some of the secrets the child so carefully guards. The technical procedure to be described attempts to utilize the material gained through the projection, directly and indirectly.

The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Orphanage at Pleasantville, New York, established a psychiatric clinic over three years ago in the hope that a psychiatric approach might assist the institution personnel in solving some of the conduct problems which had been baffling them for many years, and had virtually brought educational prog