On Latency1

From the standpoint of the intellectual ability of the child in latency, we could expect the child to associate freely. The factors responsible for the child's failure to do so create a general limitation of child analysis. There are several reasons for his inability to associate. In addition to those well known to us, I will mention only one which has not been stressed yet: Free association is experienced by the child as a particular threat to his ego organization.

The use of free association is actually a regression to the primary process. In early latency the child is still close to the period when his mind was mainly dominated by the pleasure-principle and conscious and unconscious contents were not yet strictly separated. It is only with great difficulty that the child learns that contradictions exclude each other and that contradictory thoughts must be kept apart in conversation.

For the sake of adults, the child behaves as though he were living by the rules of the secondary process. However, listening to children five to eight years old, when they are engaged in conversations with each other, convinces us that conscious production does not necessarily mean constant utilization of the secondary process. Their conscious thought processes (on the surface similar to ours) can during the latency period still easily dip into the primary process. Any newly acquired accomplishment can easily be undone by regressive processes and the child senses that this would occur were he to attempt to express whatever comes into his mind. Therefore the child must fight against free association more than the adult. A particularly strong anticathexis is needed to safeguard the hardly achieved intactness of ego functioning. Free association is possible only after children have gradually developed the capacity for introspection. This hardly ever occurs before prepuberty when the superego approaches a state of consolidation.

Before we speak about latency and the technique ap