Some Comments on the Simultaneous Analysis of a Father and his Adolescent Son

In the history of child analysis, the technique of dealing with parents and their involvement in the analytic process have been important problems. From the first case of child analysis the part played by parents has been a primary consideration. Freud (1909) set this pattern in "The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy" by utilizing the important relationship of the boy's father and conducting the entire analysis through this parent. To our knowledge there have been no other reported cases of a child analyzed by his parent, and in general the difficulty in establishing transference and maintaining objectivity would appear to militate against such a procedure.

As early as 1945 Anna Freud stated that during the evaluation of a child for analysis, one must assess the ego of the parents and borrow from the parent's ego during the analysis of the child. In the psychoanalytic treatment of children, the analyst must depend upon the parents' cooperation, and he must be mindful of the part parents play in the resistance to the resolution of the neurotic process in the child. The child analyst must therefore deal not only with the child but also with one or both parents so that the child can become free of his regressive fixations and move forward developmentally. These efforts are frequently diverted by the intensity of a parent's neurosis and its effect upon the child. In such instances the analysis of the child does not succeed unless the involved parent is also analyzed. Anna Freud indicated that most of the cases seen in the earlier period