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This paper was presented at a seminar on Child Analysis during the Twentieth International Psychoanalytic Congress held in Paris in 1957. (Other papers read at this seminar were published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and are abstracted under that journal heading in this issue.)
In the analysis of a child whose anxieties do not permit it to be separated from its parents, can one give interpretations that may be traumatic to the parents? Dr. Pichon-Riviere believes that we can and must do so, provided we consider the couple, mother and child or father and child, as together being the patient. She describes a case of a four-year-old boy who had killed a cousin two months old by beating it over the head with a bottle and filling its mouth with cotton wool. The analyst was able, through her relationship first with the mother and then with the father, and through play interpretation with the child, to uncover and clarify many conflicts of the parents, including the father's repressed hostility to his own siblings and the mother's guilt at having left her son alone with the baby cousin.