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Etchegoyen wrote this paper to be read at the 32nd International Psychoanalytical Congress, Helsinki, in July 1981, and it was published in 1982 by the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 63: 65–75.
The purpose of the psychoanalytic treatment is to reconstruct the past filling in the gaps of childhood memories, which are the result of repression. This is achieved by overcoming the resistances and solving the transference through the analysis of dreams, parapraxes and screen memories, no less than symptoms and character traits. The theories on human development, infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex formulated by Freud using this method were strongly supported not only by the results of the treatment but also by the psychoanalysis of children, which can study these same phenomena in status nascendi.
In the small child, lacking verbal instruments for communication, the problems to be investigated cannot be reached directly through language, but there remains the possibility to see them reproduced in the transference and to interpret them, waiting for the patient’s associations to support or refute us.