Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

March 23, 1983. THE NATURE OF THE ANALYTIC PROCESS IN CHILD AND ADULT ANALYSIS. Allan Jong, M.D.

Dr. Jong discussed the case of A., a girl who was eight years old when she was seen in consultation because of deterioration in her previously excellent academic performance and such excessive demands for affection and attention that her peers avoided her. She also had a fear of robbers and worried that her mother would die. A. was born six years after her sister. Her maternal grandmother had died when A. was three, and shortly thereafter, A.'s mother had returned to work. When A. was four, her mother was hospitalized for one week. Immediately after that, her father went away for a month. Her parents fought bitterly throughout the marriage and separated when she was five. A.'s father was a depressed man who lost several jobs during A.'s analysis. Her mother was a depressed, narcissistic, and ambitious woman who showed little understanding of her daughter's troubles. In her initial interviews, A. spoke of her frightening nightmares. In one, her mother was killed and put into a machine that remade her; later, her mother, father, sister, and herself (as a baby) were reunited. She spontaneously connected this dream to her concerns about her family.

Psychotherapy was begun on a weekly basis. A., who initially saw her problems as difficulties with the environment, began to see her problems as arising from within herself. Her dramatizations and fantasies began to involve the analyst. After a few months, her mother became more committed to the treatment and accepted Dr. Jong's recommendation of analysis for the child. A.'s major resistance in the first month of analysis was expressed in her reluctance to come four times a week; she came late and ignored the analyst. When it was suggested that she saw analysis as another instance of adults making decisions for her, her tardiness abated. With the help of the analyst, she was able to begin to acknowledge and to tol