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This paper reports on fine child analytic work by a gifted child analyst. I am particularly pleased to share my thoughts about Georgie's analysis as Ann has done me the honor of discussing my work. I shall construct my contribution around the dual axes of triadic reality and the analysis of a child with same sex parents by an analyst of the opposite sex.
In a series of papers (Herzog, 2007), I have set forth the notion that from an analytic perspective it is useful to think of self-structure as composed of self with mother, self with father and self with mother and father together representations. This structure allows the child analyst and his adult counterpart to conceptualize the transference as a dynamic and movable entity in which it is to be expected that one or another of these perspectives will emerge at any given moment. Furthermore, it becomes possible to understand that intrapsychic movement amongst these various representational self-constituents is the dynamic underpinning of the ego's capacity to play and thus for multiple perspectives to emerge and subserve the therapeutic process. It is this putative intrapsychic architecture that I call triadic reality and it is the capacity to utilize the implicit mobility which the three self-representational structures impart which I suggest allows for optimal neurotic organization.
It should be immediately obvious that this developmental postulation is platonic if it is thought to be exclusively isomorphic with the realities of most children's caretaking experience. Increasingly, children are reared in surrounds which bear little or no resemblance to the so-called nuclear family of old, even though the political right continues to champion this aspect of former social reality as if it were the only way that intimacy and caregiving can occur. We have known for some time that children are remarkably ingenious in all life-maintaining behaviors and adaptations when it comes to achieving from the Umwelt what is essenti