Special Review: Child Analysis*

This little book is the transcription of four lectures delivered at the School of Instruction of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (we are not told when). The lecturer is the daughter of Sigmund Freud; the content is presented in a clear and simple fashion and one suspects might have been a bit disappointing to her hearers, who were probably expecting an exposition much more profound and illuminating. The author herself recognizes this and regrets that she is unable to clarify many of the points at issue concerning child analysis. She modestly sets out to describe only what she herself has found and been able to accomplish in the children with whom she has had to deal. One must confess that after the brilliant speculations of Melanie Klein on infant analysis and the exciting forays of Frances Wickes into the inner life of the child, Anna Freud's lectures sound a bit tame. But on a closer reading they would seem to make up in common sense what they lack in other directions; they point out what one actually finds in dealing with children and take up the obvious matters that make child analysis so difficult in actual practice.

In the introductory lecture Anna Freud raises the questions of how far analysis is a method applicable to children and what modifications and alterations it should undergo when used. She puts aside their solution until she has described her actual procedure in cases in which analysis seemed advisable for reasons explained later. She first discusses the differences in the situation of the child and the adult, which arise from the fact of the child being an immature and dependent creature. If he comes for analysis he is brought by someone else; often, perhaps usually he feels no concern over his illness and therefore he has no will to be cured. Anna Freud, as the first step, devotes herself to making the young patient “analysable,” to giving him an insight into his illness, arousing his confidence in the analyst and her methods and producing in him