Discussion

I have been intrigued by the analysis of children since I first started to visit Anna Freud's Hampstead Clinic regularly, about thirty years ago. I felt there a kind of benign envy at what appeared to me to be the greater challenge and greater freedom of working with children. What seemed most exciting was the glimpse the Hampstead Clinic offered of the possibility of psychoanalytic prophylaxis. It was clear how the chances of a child's future mental health could be so improved if only one had the money and might (Freud, also envious, called this “the therapeutic power of Emperor Joseph”) to bring our knowledge of psychic development to practical institutionalized form. If only we could train enough child analysts and therapists, teachers and parental surrogates, to help children and their parents to confront and attenuate early psychic dangers and conflicts. By the time I seriously thought of seeking out training in child analysis for myself, I felt it was too late, that I was too enmeshed in my career to start out comfortably as a novice. I have often regretted this step not taken, and reading Dr. Shaw's presentation, which also gives the promise of prophylaxis for his patient, revived these regrets and the envy of my many close friends who are child analysts.

W. H. Auden in his great poem on the death of Sigmund Freud says:

All that he did was to remember

Like the old and be honest like children (1939, p. 951).

We are wiser and sadder today than in 1939 about the difficulties inherent both to remembering and being honest for adult and child