Internal Conflict and Growth in a Child Preparing to Start School

The transition from home to school is one of the most important changes in the life of a developing child. Separation problems, which have their roots in the child's earliest experiences, generally become more evident at this time. Also the child's own route through early stages of development and individuation may receive a jolt, when he or she is faced with the demands of a more social situation, with its increased need for restraint and uniformity, and its new opportunities to make relationships with children and adults, especially teachers.

I shall outline a case-study about a girl of three and a half years called Georgina, who came for three times weekly psychotherapy for one and a half years before starting school, when she reduced to once weekly. I shall describe her internal conflicts as her anxieties about going to school increased, and the parallel between the separation from home and parents and her experience of separation in the transference relationship with the psychotherapist. I aim to show that her achievement in working through intense infantile conflicts was of central impotance to her making a successful social change, the transition from home to life at school.

Georgina was referred to a child guidance clinic at the age of three and a half. The whole family were offered an initial appointment but father did not come because of pressure of work. Georgina was reportedly progressing well in most areas, but her mother, insistent that there was a hold up in her development was intensely upset about Georgina's behaviour: her repeated aggression towards her nine months old brother, Jason, and her wetting and soiling. (Georgina had in fact been toilet-trained before the age of two.) She found Georgina to be alternately clinging, then distant and unmanageable. She was dismayed that Georgina was hated by children in the vicinity and at her playgroup because of her attacks on them. She dated the beginning of the difficulties from the time Georgina went to nu