Child Psychoanalysis, Adult Psychoanalysis, and Developmental Psychology: Introduction to Symposium on Child Analysis, Part II

The following collection of papers is the second and final part of a special symposium on child analysis that began in the previous issue of this journal. The papers in that issue suggested directions for reawakening the dormant child analytic tradition: from apparently divergent positions, they advanced a relationship-oriented clinical perspective that comprehends the pervasive and autonomous role of psychic reality without subordinating the actuality of social interactions to it. Although those papers were clinically focused, the current group of papers, by Jay B. Frankel, Peter Fonagy and Mary Target, and Susan Coates, extends these possibilities to the more conceptual and empirical exchanges between child analysis and the fields with which it is in greatest proximity—developmental psychology and adult analysis itself. These dialogues have often been awkward and uncertain, and child analysts have lagged behind adult analysts in incorporating developmental findings as well as in generating new theories of therapeutic action and technique. Although clinical thinking about adult analysis has been transformed in the last decades, many child analysts remain snared in an awkward compromise with loyalty to constricting clinical theories and have failed to explicate the clinical implications of their own flexible approach to children and families.