The Developmental Roots of Self-Injury and Response to Pain in a 4-Year-Old Boy

ANNA FREUD (1977) CONSIDERED THE PRINCIPAL TASK FACING child analysts to be the extension of psychoanalytic child psychology through the more detailed study of developmental processes, anomalies, and disturbances. She firmly believed that child analysts were in a unique position to undertake this task and that, through both treatment and psychoanalytically informed observation of children, they could significantly clarify and extend our knowledge of early development. She took the view that child development could only be understood if due weight were given to the relative contributions of constitutional, environmental, and maturational factors and their mutual interactions, in all their variations; and she saw how the outcome was further affected by factors of timing, intensity, and the extent to which the contributants were suitably matched. Such complexities would determine how far development proceeded in harmony or disharmony, and would lay the early foundations for normative adaptation or for neurotic or nonneurotic disorder.