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I am going to attempt to illustrate the method of psychotherapy which I use in treating the emotionally ill children referred to me in a hospital setting. There are many controversies about the application of psychoanalytic principles and technique to, psychotherapy. These range between the ideas of Alexander (1954) that psychotherapy should be primarily uncovering, interpretative and insight-aiming, and the ideas of Bibring (1954) which indicate that dynamic psychotherapy is built around different selections or combinations of five major therapeutic techniques: suggestion, manipulation, abreaction, clarification and interpretation.
Tarachow (1963) considered that psychotherapy was basically a selective limited treatment in which rearrangement rather than resolution was the aim. Transference, repression and resistances are dealt with in such a way as to preserve their stability. Interestingly Malan (1967) described how when a group of psychoanalytically orientated psychotherapists embarked on a project to try to discover the limitation* of brief psychotherapy, they were surprised to find that their treatment bore the best results when there was a willingness on the part of the patient and the therapist to become deeply involved in depth and to bear the tension which ensued. In this type of psychotherapy involvement manifested itself in the transference experiences, the positive and negative aspects of which were interpreted and reconstructed in terms of early life experiences with the parental objects.
Most writers consider that the psychotherapist is more selective in his approach to the patient's material than is the psychoanalyst. Balint's (1972) group had a specific aim of working through a given aspect of psychopathology in a limited period. Tarachow (1963) assumed that the psychotherapist would disturb defences only in so far as was necessary to achieve the maximum therapeutic gain. It was, however, questioned how far psychotherapy could brin