This article attempts to explore certain sources of gain in psychoanalytic work with children. Therapeutic gains are shown to be directly related to the patient's development of the capacity to empathize with his or her own self-representations as experienced and communicated by the therapist. Although the patient's self-representations come to be experienced by the therapist in a variety of ways, the focus in this article is primarily on the patient's use of projective identification. Clinical material is used to illustrate a sequence that involves (a) the projection of initially disowned self-elements, (b) the evocation of corresponding affects and fantasies in the therapist, (c) the patient's empathic scrutiny of the fate of these elements while contained within the therapist, and (d) the eventual reinternalization by the patient of the now therapeutically transformed self- elements. In addition, it is argued that those elements of the therapist's self that are experienced by the patient as related to the projected material will also be reinternalized.