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OVER THE PAST 10 YEARS I HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN THE treatment of a number of young children whose problems in the management of aggression emerged most clearly in sessions where I saw the children and their mothers together. In this paper I describe some of my clinical experience and outline technical issues encountered when young children and their mothers are seen together.
The work I describe has as part of its background my interest in the aggression so clearly seen in toddlers. At times this seems a response to frustration, but at other times it seems to have a "pleasurable" quality in and of itself, relatively independent of frustration, reward, or punishment. It was this "driven" quality, observed in adult patients, that led Freud (1920) to conceptualize aggression as a drive in its own right. It may be, as Anna Freud (1972) put it so concisely, that "to attack is a direct derivative of the aggressive drive; while aggression in the service of defense is a learned response mediated via the ego" (p. 171).
The clinical material and technical issues described in this paper do not resolve any of the current questions about the status of aggression as a drive. My hope, however, is that they are a useful addition to our knowledge about how we can help young