Interactions Between Nursery School and Child Guidance Clinic*

Links between the therapy of children and their education are few and far between in our times. For the student of the subject this makes it all the more important to look for information to the small number of organisations in the United States and England where the two types of work are found side by side. The benefit which they derive from each other under such conditions is not difficult to demonstrate. Nevertheless, before entering into an account of these practical advantages, it seems appropriate to go further afield and to give evidence of the thinking which underlies such ventures.

Adding educational to clinical work represents the attempt to right a wrong which is being done to the children's services by specialisation, i.e. by a method which has been taken over from the adult field and applied to them unchanged. In the case of adults, we find no fault with the idea that their needs are split into medical, psychological, spiritual, legal ones, etc., and that there are specialised professions offering specialised aid. Even here the fields may overlap, as they do where psychological or mental health problems enter into and complicate the legal ones, or in psychosomatic medicine where organic and mental aetiology is intermingled, or in cases where medical specialisation has gone too far and the independent function, or dysfunction, of an organ is overemphasised at the expense of its interaction with other organ systems. Nevertheless, on the whole, the structuralisation and differentiation of the adult's personality are in tune with the differentiation of the services which are available to him.

Our practical experiences of children as well as our psychoanalytic knowledge of their mental processes leave us in no doubt that none of these assumptions are valid if transferred to their case. Where the mature individual is differentiated and structured, the immature personality is undifferentiated and unst