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Comprehensive training in the aims and methods of chid psychoanalysis has been available in the United States, mainly in major psychoanalytic institutes and so selected procedures have been adopted, often idiosyncratically, in the various mental health disciplines. As a result, psychologically disturbed children are often treated according to a loose range of “eclectic” theories. Now a
long-needed, systematic presentation of technique, set in a firm foundation of classic and well-reasoned psychoanalytic theory, has appeared. It deserves a sturdy welcome.
The 27 chapters cover four main areas: practical arrangements, the therapeutic relationship, the child's modes of expression, and interpretation and outcome. All the material has been drawn from the records of the Hampstead Index, as discussed in meetings of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic with Anna Freud, and distilled by the three authors.
The technique of child analysis is presented as it is practiced in the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic, which no doubt explains why most references are made to “therapists” rather than to analysts. This may be disconcerting to analysts in the United States, where “therapist” is a generic term used by practitioners of many varieties. For similar reasons related to the Hampstead Clinic functions, the first section of the book, dealing with frequency of sessions, interruptions, changes of therapist and of setting, although instructive, will have minor application for those in private practice.
Certain basic themes are taken up repeatedly: that the analyst is perceived as a real person far more by the child than by the adult; the essential effort to help the child communicate verbally and to bear the pain of facing internal conflict; the errors of too profound interpretation or pseudo-interpretation; differences between psychoanalytic technique and methods that depend on play, interpretation of symbols, or of assumed negative transference, or corrective experience. Each of the latt