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The need for a Profile of adult patients has made itself felt in our clinical work for some time, especially for those cases where a child and one or the other parent are in treatment simultaneously.
Our original Profile schema was devised for neurotic child patients in order to facilitate the organization of the material available about them under psychoanalytically meaningful headings (before, during, or after therapy). When the Profile was subsequently applied beyond the scope of the neurosis, a number of sections had to be amplified to embrace all the details relevant to the individual's specific pathology. In the case of the blind, this involved above all the headings concerned with phase development, fixation and regression. In the case of the borderline children, so far the sections containing information about cathexis of self and cathexis of objects have been provided with subdivisions to trace in more minute detail the location of pathology. When the Profile schema was applied to the characterization of the adolescent, it had to be widened to accommodate the variations of superego development, ideal formation, and the identity problems, which form an essential part of the adolescent's upheaval.1
While the Profile schema as such profited from these expansions and gained so far as its scope of application was concerned, the basic