Introduction

What? You have had small children in analysis? Children of less than six years? Can that be done? And is it not most risky for the children?

It can be done very well. It is hardly to be believed, what goes on in a child of four or five years old. Children are very active-minded at that age; their early sexual period is also a period of intellectual flowering. I have an impression that with the onset of the latency period they become mentally inhibited as well, stupider. From that time, on, too, many children lose their physical charm. And, as regards the damage done by early analysis, I may inform you that the first child on whom the experiment was ventured, nearly twenty years ago, has since then grown into a healthy and capable young man, who has passed through his puberty irreproachably, in spite of some severe psychical traumas. It may be hoped that things will turn out no worse for the other ‘victims’ of early analysis. Much that is of interest attaches to these child analyses; it is possible that in the future they will become still more important. From the point of view of theory, their value is beyond question.

As we can see, child psychoanalysis has been practised since the beginning of the twentieth century. It has been very successful therapeutically, and has made an incomparable contribution to psychoanalytical theory both in the wealth of material supplied and in the therapeutic potential that it offers. In our practice of psychoanalysis, we have been able to observe daily the reality of the findings of our predecessors, Sigmund Freud first and foremost. We saw the possibility that we ourselves might be able to contribute something to the theorization of child psychoanalysis in particular and to psychoanalytical theory in general.

Yet at the same time we felt that we were practising an art in which no apparent training was given and which seemed to be considered by adult psychoanalysts as a sort of sub-specialization,