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Psychoanalytic treatment began as and remains a retrospective, reconstructive method of inquiry. Although always highly dependent on verbalization as the important datum for analysis, psychoanalysts early recognized that nonverbal behavior was also a carrier of meaning. With the discovery that the play of children roughly approximates free association, behavioral analysis revealed wish and defense and organized themes. However, this methodological advance has not enabled analysts to rescue the preverbal period from designation as a mental ice age. It can be approached or approximated only by inference from direct observations or retrospective reconstructions.
The schizophrenic child, with his sometimes minimal speech and his developmental lag in language organization, presents a problem for analysis which resembles the problem of the preverbal period. Only as the psychotic child develops language and begins to organize his behavior does interpretation become possible as in the case of the neurotic child. However, the interpretations and constructions used in treatment and in theory should be consonant with the child's cognitive and integrative structures at the stage of development to which they refer (Hartmann, 1948; Frankl, 1961). Ignorance of this caution has encumbered psychoanalysis with the historical errors of Rank's overinterpretation of the psychic responses to birth trauma and Melanie Klein's notions about what infants think.
Although it would have pleased Freud greatly to find that his reconstructions of early childhood seduction indicated a universal environmental precursor to psychoneurosis, it is also a fact that verification of that idea would have precluded Freud's most interesting discovery of psychic reality. From his earliest writings (Freud, 1899) to one of his last papers (1937), Freud reaffirmed