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Investigating the birth of child psychoanalysis and the nature and identity of child psychoanalysts seems to have been one of the authors’ main motivations for embarking on many years of work involving both the study of documents and direct contacts with analytical groups throughout the world, with a view to reconstructing the collective history and hence also the collective memory of child psychoanalysis.
The introduction quotes Freud's conviction that child psychoanalysis could exist and his statement that it had actually been conducted since the early years of the century:
the … child on whom the experiment was ventured … has since grown into a healthy and capable young man, who has passed through his puberty irreproachably, in spite of some severe psychical traumas … From the point of view of theory, [the] value [of child analyses] is beyond question (1926, pp. 214-5).
Vienna, the city that received Freud as a child and was the cradle of psychoanalysis, has been a breeding ground for geniuses of all kinds, especially in the arts, but, as the authors point out (p. 3), the unconscious is not on that account Viennese, even in children. Born in Vienna, however, psychoanalysis grew up in the United Kingdom and spread and propagated in other countries, especially those of Latin America, starting with Argentina. Bion (1961) adduces the myth of the Tower of Babel as the origin of the development of language and hence of consciousness (K), which, according to the authors, is somehow punished because of its status as an instinctual drive.
The volume begins with a preface by Anne-Marie Sandler and Hanna Segal and a foreword by Serge Lebovici, who reviews the beginnings of child psychoanalysis in the Wednesday meetings in Freud's apartment, at which, among other things, his children's dreams were discussed (perhaps they were also interpreted to the children, as was the practice of Little Hans's father).
The history falls into three parts. The first—‘The day before yesterday: beg