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In analytic work with children we are aware of factors in the conditions of therapy and the nature of the child as patient which differ markedly from the analytic situation with the adult. In the important field of transference these differences are such as to call for a re-examination of what we mean by transference in child analysis.
In this paper I shall review case material from the analyses of children in which transference phenomena are observable and permit inquiry into their motives and the manner of their appearance. In order that we can make a careful evaluation of such phenomena and judgments regarding differences and similarities in the transference with children and adults, it should be desirable to submit our data from child analysis to the test of the strict usage of the term "transference" in analytic terminology.
"By transference," says Anna Freud, "we mean all those impulses experienced by the patient in his relation with the analyst which are not newly created by the objective analytic situation but have their source in the early—indeed, the very earliest—object-relations and are now merely revived under the influence of the repetition-compulsion" (1, p. 18).
The role of transference in child analysis has met with different interpretations by Anna Freud and her co-workers and by Melanie Klein and her associates. It is the view of Anna Freud that a transference neurosis is not established in the case of the child patient. While recognizing in child analysis "manifold and variegated transferred reactions," she points out that in her own experience she has encountered no case of a child patient "where the original neurosis was given up during the treatment and replaced by a new neurotic formation in which the original objects had disappeared and the analyst taken their place in the patient's emotional life." "It is only a structure of this kind," she emphasizes, "which deserves the name of transference neurosis" (2, p. xii). Since the child still