Relational Horizons in Child Psychoanalysis

Since the 1983 publication by Greenberg and Mitchell of Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, there has been an explosion of interest in and development of the implications of a relational perspective for adult psychoanalysis. There has been no comparable undertaking in child psychoanalysis, especially in North America. It is ironic that this is so, since many of the analysts who contributed to the development of a relational point of view for adult work were child analysts, e.g., Winnicott, Klein, and many of her followers. In this paper I will spell out what I see as some of the ways in which child psychoanalysis and therapy might be transformed by an application of the relational point of view to this work. These transformations fall into two categories: work with parents, and our understanding of transference and countertransference in child work.

Traditionally, child analysts have worked with parents in only the most limited ways, that is, to guide them in their parenting, and to secure their support for the child's analysis. If necessary, parents were sent to colleagues for their own analyses. I believe this way of dealing with parents reflects the traditional child analyst's one-person bias—the tendency to focus on intrapsychic processes as constituting the analytic field. Anna Freud's (1966) emphasis on ego development brought in the parents to some extent as facilitators, or impeders, of the child's development—thus, parent guidance assumed importance. Analytic work with parents, in connection with the child work, was in a sense unthinkable. Could one do real analytic work with parents when one met with them relatively infrequently, if the focus were on the child, and if transference were not explicitly analyzed? Freudian