Part One: Introduction

This book concerns the application of psycho-analysis to child psychiatry. To my surprise I find that my experience over three or four decades of the analysis of children and adults has led me to a specific area in which psycho-analysis can be applied in the practice of child psychiatry, thus making sense of psycho-analysis in economic terms. It is obviously not useful or practicable to prescribe a psycho-analytic treatment of every child, and the psycho-analyst often has found himself or herself in difficulties when attempting to put what has been learned to good use in child psychiatry practice. I have found that by full exploitation of the first interview I am able to meet the challenge of a proportion of child psychiatry cases and I wish to give examples for the guidance of those who are doing similar work and for students who wish to make a study in this field.

The technique for this work can hardly be called a technique. No two cases are alike, and there is a much more free interchange between the therapist and the patient than there is in a straight psycho-analytic treatment. This is not to decry the importance of the long analysis in which the work is done on the day-by-day emergence into the clinical material of unconscious elements in the transference, elements in process of becoming conscious because of the continuity of the work. Psycho-analysis remains for me the basis of this work, and if I were asked by a student I would always say that the training for this work (which is not psycho-analysis) is the training in psycho-analysis. I do believe, however, that selection is the most important part of the psycho-analytic training. It is not easy to turn a badly selected candidate into a good analyst, and no doubt the main part of the selection is always self-selection. The student's own analysis extends this matter of self-selection. One would rather have a really suitable person for doing this sort of work than an ill person made less ill by the analysis th