Revue Française De Psychanalyse. XLIX, 1985: Psychoanalysis of Children and Representations. René Diatkine. Pp. 807-816.

It is of course difficult, working with children, to have much to say to advance a discussion on the relations between thought and language, or on the existence of preverbal thought. Psychoanalytic work with children does not make clear even the relation between the history of the patient and a genetic explanation. Since child patients do not readily talk of themselves or their own experiences, psychoanalysts have a certain difficulty in representing to themselves the representations of their patients. But they can say that in some privileged moments, they can well imagine what the child thinks but does not say, and even find the words that the child might have used. Otherwise, the play, the drawings, the behavioral sequences, are directly linked with the primary fantasies or to primitive defense mechanics, without the opposition between word- and thing-presentations, which defined, in 1915, the metapsychological difference between the unconscious and the conscious/preconscious. In a sense the unconscious of the child is directly replaced by the thoughts of the analyst. In the texts of 1915, word-presentations and thing-presentations, along with affects, are the psychical representatives of instinct. This