The Children We Teach

I would like to discuss what modern psychoanalysis has contributed to the understanding of childhood and adolescent development. There is a modern analytic body of theory which has grown out of analytic investigation, but when we train analysts, we train them to enter the analytic room with an open mind to a particular patient. Psychoanalysis developed first as a method of investigation, then as a technique for treatment, and finally as a science of the human mind. Most of our study of child development is done through observation and participation in the regression of particular patients on the couch. If a patient allows himself to enter this process, he regresses to his earliest childhood and he offers us the experience of going back with him to get in touch with our own infantile feelings. So, it is on a very personal level that we learn how children develop. One of the most important things for the analyst to know is his own early development through the experiences he has with his patients.

To begin this discussion I'm going to take you back to the first few months of life, after the dawn of awareness, but prior to the development of cognition. When the patient has regressed to this period of his life, pleasure and pain are all he knows. That is, the infant is aware of sensory experiences only. He may be in a state of warm harmonious comfort with sensations of pleasure filling his being, a state in which he feels at harmony with everything around him, although not aware of everything around him since he has not really begun to think or