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Analysis offers each patient a second chance to resolve problems that originated in the past. In the analysis of young children, parents have a unique opportunity to undo the developmental distortions they themselves helped create (Balint, 1968); (Anna Freud, 1968). If they are able to tolerate living through the past as it unfolds in the young child's analysis and are ready to accept new solutions for old problems, we have a better chance for therapeutic success.
The younger the child we analyze, the more we avail ourselves of the usual adjustments in technique that are dictated by our appraisal of the patient's ego attitudes, his frustration tolerance, state of needs and drives, sense of reality, nature of object relationships, and mode of family life (Anna Freud, 1946), (1965), (1968); (Pearson et al., 1968). Once we decide to analyze a young child rather than guide his parents, we uphold psychoanalytic aims and principles of psychoanalytic treatment, as we do with older patients (Bolland and Sandler, 1965); (B. Bornstein, 1931); (S. Bornstein, 1933); (E. Furman, 1956), (1957); (R. A. Furman, 1968); (Jacobs, 1949); (Harely, 1951); (A. Katan, 1959); (Kolansky, 1960); (E. Sterba, 1949; and others). By altering technical devices rather than psychoanalytic methods, we adjust our interventions to individual differences (Ritvo et al., 1963)