The Place of Once-Weekly Treatment in the Work of an Analytically Trained Child Psychotherapist*

This brief paper reintroduces a topic which was the focus of the Association's very first study weekend eleven years ago, one with which those of us who work in clinics are continually occupied, and about which after those years of experience we may be in a better position to ask the relevant questions, and to make a few tentative generalisations.

I would first of all like to consider some of the anxieties that it tends to arouse in the therapist whose own personal analysis was a more intensive experience and who received a training largely based on cases who were receiving the same kind of intensive treatment. I would then like to consider some of the real differences and difficulties attendant upon the less intensive arrangement of sessions; possible goals; methods of selecting cases; the value and the dangers of teamwork. I would then like to mention situations where modification of the analytic technique of interpretation within the transference may seem to be more appropriate. Finally, I would like to take a glance at the relevance of our training for this once-weekly work, and at the place which it may usefully occupy within the timetable of the individual therapist.

There is often the guilty feeling that we should be giving this child more for his need is great. Perhaps we are still in full analysis ourselves; at any rate we have had in the past a more leisurely opportunity to come to grips with our own problems in living. We may be treating other children on a more intensive basis and feel: why should those have an opportunity that is denied to this one? And here we need to take cognisance of our own still operative Oedipal and sibling rivalries. An obsessive need for equality and fairness which does not take practicality into account is often a sign that these are interfering with our judgment.

To make up for “selling him short” we may try too hard to get results, to become over-active, to reassure our