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The Chairman, Johan Norman, introduced the session by remarking on the asymmetry between the psychic reality of the child, which does not include the experience of being an adult and the psychic reality of the analyst's infantile experiences that are relatively unavailable to consciousness.
Norman described how the avoidance of psychic reality may be understood as an expression of ego defence mechanisms driven by anxiety or as an expression of an identification with internal objects that avoid or manipulate psychic truth. He suggested that the vicissitudes of psychic reality are particularly in evidence in child analysis and described the particular difficulties of maintaining an analytic setting which are inherent to child analysis. He referred to the significance of the psychic reality of the analyst, which must include the capacity to preserve a mental space where an integrated view of the sense of the setting and of the analysis is kept in order to allow the analyst to resonate with the child and infant like states being evoked in the transference and countertransference interaction.
The first panellist, Tessa Baradon, presented clinical material of the analysis of a 6-year-old-boy, Michael, who had been referred by his school. He was unable to cope with the academic work and was friendless. The eldest of two brothers, Michael came from a closely knit and intact family. Problems started at the age of 2, when Michael suffered a three-week separation from his mother, following his brother's birth. He was taken abroad to his father's country of origin. He returned an unsettled, anxious child, unable to separate and adjust to nursery school. Mother's relationship with Michael was intense and highly ambivalent.
Baradon postulates that Michael's problems arose as a result of deficit in achieving an enduring and integrated representation of the maternal object with a consequent split in his self representation. She further suggests that the abrupt separation at the age of