Us and Them? - The Child, The Analyst and the Parents

It is deeply regretted that Dr. John Bolland died suddenly in April 1974. A few weeks before his death he gave a talk, based upon a version of this paper, to a meeting of the Association of Child Psychotherapists. His paper stimulated a thoughtful and vigorous discussion and Dr. Bolland agreed to its publication in this Journal. He died before being able to complete the further work on the paper which he had planned to undertake. This posthumous paper is now published by kind permission of his wife, Jill Bolland.

Counter-transference in child analysis is not often discussed in the literature. In a paper entitled “Techniques of child analysis: problems of counter-transference” published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1971, Kohrman, Fineberg, Gelman and Weiss reproached child analysts for their neglect of the topic. They complained further that such counter-transference problems are treated in the literature with a discretion which is perhaps over-delicate. As a child analyst my reactions to their paper were somewhat mixed. I felt that I was being scolded for not doing my homework, and that they were not making sufficient allowance for the painfulness of some aspects of counter-transference and the consequent reluctance to publish studies of it. Nevertheless, there is much substance in their assessment of the situation, and I particularly liked the discussion of how knowledge of counter-transference phenomena might be used to further the course of an analysis.

I have been used for some years now to talking with some social worker, psychology and child psychotherapy colleagues about all kinds of feelings concerning children and their parents in connection with my work at the Child Guidance Training Centre. Our therapeutic work there takes the form of once-weekly psychotherapy and is based on the premise that children do not exist in a vacuum, that a child is not just a neat little parcel consisting of an unconscious plus an assortment of d