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In a 1925 preface to Aichhorn's Wayward Youth, Freud said, "… children have become the main subject of psycho-analytic research and have thus replaced in importance the neurotics on whom its studies began."1 Anna Freud took up Freud's challenge in her studies of the psychoanalytic psychology of normal and abnormal development. In "The Principal Task of Child Analysis," she said:
The study of purely developmental aspects has not been taken up very seriously in child analysis so far. At least, it is still waiting to advance from the realm of mere observation and description of facts to their application to the technique of treatment. We have not yet learned how to deal with developmental deficiencies, although many of them underlie the infantile neuroses and, as mentioned above, are often inextricably bound up with them. Developmental disharmonies are a fertile breeding ground for almost every type of infantile neurosis… To the extent to which developmental harm can be undone belatedly, child analysis may accept it as its next duty to devise methods for the task.2