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THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF CHILD ANALYSIS TO ADULT ANALYSIS ARE familiar from long hearing and frequent repetition. There is little or nothing in the psychoanalytic literature, however, about what it is that adult analysis has contributed and has to contribute to child analysis. This paper, then, is like a voyage into unknown territory, a voyage of discovery. As such it can at best reveal the principal features and the broad outline of the terrain. To explore that terrain in more detail and to map it accurately are tasks which must await later visits. A first voyage can do no more than arouse interest and, hopefully, stimulate a desire to return at some time for a second and closer look.
One contribution of adult analysis to child analysis would seem at first glance to be merely a historical one. Adult analysis preceded child analysis and hence, in the historical sense, made it possible. There would have been no child analysis if analysis of adults had not shown the way, though once child analysis began, it developed on its own and is now a flourishing enterprise in its own right.
Still, one may wonder whether the facts of psychosexual development and functioning in childhood, which are so obvious today