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THIS PAPER TOUCHES ON TWO OF THE MANY POSSIBLE AREAS FOR psychoanalytic investigation of "atypical" children. This term is applied to children who fall neither into the category of "neurosis" (i.e., who have an adequate developmental history and structuralization), nor within the categories of childhood psychosis, autism,
mental defect, or those described as "borderline." The "atypical" group is thus defined negatively in terms of what the children do not display, rather than positively in terms of what they do. There is room for much research to chart out some of the different types of atypical development, from the points of view of symptomatology and personality; and of psychoanalytic findings, ranging from metapsychological formulations of the underlying dynamics and structure, to problems in technique. An ultimate aim might be to see if it is possible to assign different types of aberration (seen clinically and understood metapsychologically) to different stages and facets of development, in this way formulating a "developmental line" (A. Freud, 1965) of the foci of unusual development, from which factors underlying or preceding different aberrations might be isolated.
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