The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. An Annual 9, 1954: Augusta Alpert, Ph.D. (New York). 'Observations on the Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children in a Therapeutic Centre.' Pp. 334–343.

The author continues her account of experimental procedures in the therapeutic education of disturbed children in the Nursery of Council Child Development Center (Alpert and Krown, Psychoanal. Study of Child, 8, 1953). Procedures are discussed which aim at helping children whose acute separation anxieties appear in the context of a disturbed mother relation. New corrective identifications are established with the help of personal relationships in the nursery. Procedures are described which meet the difficulty of holding these children together for any type of group experience. A further problem concerns poverty of sublimatory capacity. Sluggishness of libido and weak ego organization predispose these children to adhere indefinitely to a regressive smearing use of paint. Materials serving regressive needs were separated from those with more progressive sublimatory possibilities and the children given more directional help for articulate pictorial presentation. In this way they became able to avoid the seductive influence of the material.

Both experiences give meaning to the children's needs for someone to hold boundaries and set limits for them, and effect a dosage of experience. The problem now is to determine what structurings the