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Years ago, as a pre-school teacher for two-, three-, and four-year olds at a progressive, child-centered school, the skills I learned were wonderful prep-aration for my later work as a psychoanalyst: listening deeply, taking the minds and feelings of others seriously, offering empathy, setting limits, focusing on the underlying reasons for behavior (rather than on the behavior itself), and working toward conflict resolution. The goal was to encourage each child’s individual growth, helping them to become ever more autonomous, well-related, and collaborative; observant, thoughtful, and emotionally attuned to self and other. Being with a group of young children every day in this way allowed me to see up close the joy, vitality, and creativity, the vulnerability, rage, and despair, and the simultaneous openness and resistance to learning that children uninhibitedly express. I could say that almost everything I need to know about psychoanalysis, I learned in that preschool.
The four papers comprising this suite, by Fabia Banella, Marilou Kountria, Brent Willock, and Raimundo Guerra-Cid, illustrate the ways in which relational child psychoanalysis is, like a good preschool classroom, a space for play and learning, especially when development has hit a snag and parents are at a loss to help their children move forward in healthy ways. Initially presented together online at an IARPP workshop on child and adolescent psychoanalysis in the fall of 2023, the papers—two case extended case studies by Banella and Kountria, with discussions of each by Willock and Guerra-Cid—struck me immediately as being just right for Perspectives, showcasing an international group of child and adolescent analysts (from Italy, Greece, Canada, and Spain, respectively) and the richness of child analytic work, but also highlighting to adult psychoanalysis (Sopher & Perlman, 2021). As my own training analyst never tired of saying, as analysts we can never go wrong by tracing the roots of behavior to o