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Anthony attempts to construct a dynamic model useful to the child analyst and discusses the family's impingement on the treatment. He traces the spotty history of the family in psychoanalytic theory from Freud to present-day child psychoanalysts, for whom the family is obviously a far more important challenge than it is to psychoanalysts who treat only adults. Among child analysts there are many differences regarding the involvement of the family in the child's analysis. The author's procedure is initially to learn as much as he can about the family from the parents. This working model of the real family is subject to modifications as changes occur during treatment. With the working through of the oedipal conflict in the transference, the relationships within the family often improve. Anthony reports an unusual case of a nine-year-old girl to exemplify his views and his analytic technique. The divorced parents far away from the scene authorized the author by letter to analyze the child. The child was brought to the sessions by her seventeen-year-old sister who had been left to manage the home and the younger children. During the first year of treatment, one could see the impingement of family pathology on the treatment, the formation of the "family complex," the reactivation of the family romance within the transference, the interplay between the "unconscious" family, the representational family, the actual family, and the analyst's hypothetical family. Anthony feels that the child analyst should bring the family as a psychic phenomenon more fully and frequently into the analytic work while recognizing the impact of the actual family on the analytic process.