Historical Legacies and Contemporary Innovation: Introduction to Symposium on Child Analysis Part I

As readers of this journal are well aware, North American psychoanalysis has been transformed in the last decade by the relational revision of analytic paradigms. Relational understandings have become essential in both theory and technique, with an intersubjective, developmentally oriented perspective gaining prominence at the center of current analytic controversies. But the integration of this transformation with child analysis has lagged far behind its effect on clinical work with adults and on theory in general. The publication of the following collection of articles in Psychoanalytic Dialogues points toward the promising prospect that this gap may be closing, such that the move toward a relationship-oriented psychoanalysis can now be allied with the varied strengths of the child analytic tradition.

That this has not happened sooner would appear to be a curious state of affairs. Historically, child analysis has been, arguably, the most fertile source of innovation in analytic thinking. Many of the leading attributes of the relational turn have long been at the center of child analytic theory and practice: the overall developmental perspective; the assertion of the importance of the earliest relationships and especially of mother-infant relationships; and, in regard to clinical theory, an affirmative attention to the value and meaning of clinical interaction and of relationships in general (Sabot, 1980). Child psychotherapists