Introduction

THE beginnings of Child Analysis go back more than two decades, to the time when Freud himself carried out his analysis of 'Little Hans'.1 This first analysis of a child was of great theoretic importance in two respects. Its success in the case of a child of under five showed that psycho-analytic methods could be applied to small children; and, perhaps more important still, it was able fully to demonstrate, by direct contact with the child, the hitherto much-questioned existence of those infantile instinctual tendencies which Freud had discovered in the adult. In addition, the results obtained from it held out the hope that further analyses of small children would give us a deeper and more accurate knowledge of their psychology than analysis of adults had done, and would thus be able to make important and fundamental additions to the theory of Psycho-Analysis. But this hope remained unrealized for a long time. For many years Child Analysis continued to be a relatively unexplored region in the domain of Psycho-Analysis, both as a science and a therapy. Although several analysts, Dr. H. Hug-Hellmuth2 in especial, have since undertaken analyses of children, no fixed rules as regards its technique or application have been evolved. This is doubtless the reason why the great practical and theoretical possibilities of Child Analysis have not yet been generally