Correspondence

Letter to the Editors from Prof. Peter Hobson, Developmental Psychopathology Research Unit, Tavistock Clinic, London

I would like to make a comment on the paper by Christopher Reeves entitled: ‘Children, words and symptomatic acts’ [Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 22(2), 279-298). The author is dealing with subtle and important issues, central amongst which is how children come to understand what they are experiencing and expressing. In the course of a sophisticated and (I believe) well founded discussion of Frege's distinctions among sign, sense and reference, and the relevance of such distinctions for understanding ‘concrete’, often idiosyncratic and non-context-sensitive language in autism and childhood psychosis, he writes as follows:

In short, I am saying that, before a piece of behaviour or verbal expression can attain (unconscious) significance for the child, it must first possess some (conscious or would-be-conscious) signification. The first task required of the psychotherapist may be to help the child understand what she is consciously about in what she says or does, before even beginning to look with her at its latent, unconscious or symbolic meaning…. it is both developmentally and therapeutically desirable to help the child endow these actions and expressions with the appropriate signification—to verbalize their manifest or intended meaning — so that they may subsequently become (among other things) carriers of symbolic, metaphorical, even symptomatic significance. (pp. 284-5)

I find two matters perplexing: firstly, the sharp dichotomy Reeves creates between a child consciously and unconsciously meaning (and intending-to-mean) on a given occasion; and secondly, the temporal priority he accords to ‘understanding children's words and actions in terms of their conscious or intended meaning before seeking a latent, symbolic meaning for them and attempting to convey this to the child in therapy’ (p. 279). I agree that a child may verbally express something with