Hampstead Nursery Follow-Up Studies—1. Sudden Separation and its Effect Followed Over Twenty Years

Observational data recorded during war work with young children in the Hampstead Nurseries can now, twenty years later, serve as a basis for a small number of follow-up studies. Where follow-up contacts in later childhood and adolescence revealed problems for which psychoanalytic treatment seemed indicated, the children and their parents were informed of the opportunity for treatment at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic. Only a few, however, have fully recognized their need and undertaken psychoanalysis. In these cases, the observations recorded in the Nursery and the subsequent analytic data provide rich material for comparison and verification of the assumptions made earlier. Studies based on this material are now in their final stages, and papers dealing with the details of the findings are in preparation.

The Hampstead Follow-up Study has been concerned also with children whose development has proceeded satisfactorily and who have been able to deal with inner problems and external circumstances in ways which did not call for therapeutic intervention. The analytic material of these cases would have been of great interest for research, but the fact that these children were not in need of treatment has made it impossible to study their development by this method.

Without insight into unconscious processes, a long-term study of development is severely limited. Nevertheless, we have found that observations recorded over a period of years can lead to valuable