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In 1954, Joyce McDougall understook the analysis of a nine-and-a-half-year-old American boy whose family had moved to Paris. The child was remarkably intelligent and highly verbal. For many months he demanded that the analyst take as dictation everything he said; frequently he insisted on a playback of his dictation, as well as the analyst's notations and interpretations of the text. The case was further distinguished by the supervision of Serge Lebovici in a group seminar at the Paris Institute for Psychoanalysis. An account of the analysis, Un cas de psychose infantile, was first published in 1960.1
The English version is equally rewarding despite considerable abridgment. While the theoretical and bibliographical discussion published in the French edition is omitted, the flavor of it is condensed in an elegant and simple preface by D. W. Winnicott, and a succinct introduction. The analysis is presented in its original form (it was conducted in English); a session-by-session commentary by the analyst is included. Appended are notes on a subsequent analysis of the mother by the same analyst, as well as a report of the special school where Sammy eventually went, interrupting the therapy eleven months after it began.
Drs. McDougall and Lebovici have specific goals in mind in presenting the dialogue with Sammy called psychoanalysis. There is even a message in the title since it bespeaks their belief that the main therapeutic effect of a child analysis occurs through the re-establishment of the mother-child dialogue which originally leads to the maturation of the sense of reality in the nonpsychotic child. While they achieved some goals better than others, the description of the course of a child analysis alone would be a significant contribution. As a teaching device, this case can be the next best thing to the supervision of an actual therapy. All the elements of analytic technique are available and described in an artistic and at times poetic form. We are a