IV. The Technique of Analysis in the Latency Period

CHILDREN in the latency period present special difficulties of their own in analysis. Unlike the small child, whose lively imagination and acute anxiety enable us to gain an easier insight into its unconscious and make contact there, they have a very limited imaginative life, in accordance with the strong tendency to repression which is characteristic of their age; while, in comparison with the grown-up person, their ego is still undeveloped, and they neither understand that they are ill nor want to be cured, so that they have no incentive to start analysis and no encouragement to go on with it. Added to this is the general attitude of reserve and distrust so typical of this period of life—an attitude which is in part an outcome of their intense preoccupation with the struggle against masturbation and thus makes them deeply averse to any-thing that savours of sexual enquiry or touches on the impulses they are keeping under with so much difficulty.

Patients of this age neither play like small children nor give verbal associations like adults. Thus the analyst finds no clear way of access to them. Nevertheless I have found it possible to establish the analytic situation without delay by making contact with their unconscious, as I do in the case of small children, but from an angle of approach which is suited to their older minds. The small child is still under the immediate and powerful influence of its instinctual experiences and phantasies and puts them in front