Finding Words: Affect, Behaviour and Meaning in the Psychoanalysis of Children

Child psychoanalysis provides a particularly rich terrain for the study of developmental progressions and regressions and the way in which movement towards adaptation tends to contain valiant attempts to survive painful and overwhelming affects. Peter Blos Jr, Chair of the Organising Committee, introduced this panel on child analysis, in which two case presentations and discussions were used to illustrate how psychoanalysts working with young children go about finding words for and giving meaning to affects and behaviour. The two case presenters, with exceptional ability, used rich process material and revealing discussion to portray the affective aliveness of the treatments.

In his introductory remarks, the Moderator, Martin Silverman, proposed listening to the cases with an ear to similarities and differences between the two children and the two analysts and to the question of what factors ultimately create effective treatment. He pointed out that both children tested the limits of their analysts' endurance and care. Both analysts proved to be patient, persistent and tolerant as they drew strength from their understanding of the defensive meaning of the children' words, play and actions. He addressed differences between Freudian and Kleinian approaches to the inner and outer worlds and that we are always working with what has occurred both in interaction with the environment and within the child' internal psychic representations and fantasies.

The first panellist, Liliana Pualuan de Gomberoff, presented a case entitled, ‘The fear of disappearing: affects aroused by separation as observed in the analysis of a 3-year-old girl’.

The 3-year-old Aurelia attended analysis four times a week, and entered it presenting a precocious and charming use of language. She was a little girl who acted like a ‘know-it-all’, became inconsolably sad and miserable at times, and seemed to make use of her wide vocabulary to avoid real contact with her mother, father and baby brother. Her an