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THE CHILD PSYCHOANALYST SETS OUT TO UNDERSTAND HIS PATIENT'S behavior and to interpret its unconscious meaning in a systematic way. For this purpose, he has a special setting at his disposal which includes toys and an appropriate office where the child can play. His knowledge also enables him to understand the child's play as a special language.
The analyst sets out systematically to interpret the unconscious content of the child's behavior. This systematic interpretation is his basic therapeutic instrument and also his fundamental way of participating in the analytic relationship. However, the analyst often finds, almost consistently at the beginning of the analysis, that the child is not willing to participate in the interaction proposed by the analyst: its paradigm would be: patient's behavior ® analyst's interpretation ® patient's behavior ® analyst's interpretation.
The analyst's interpretation affects the patient in diverse ways. One of these is to provoke some degree of psychic pain, a natural, unavoidable, and beneficial part of the interpretation. Ideally, the analyst's interpretation should not provoke greater psychic pain than the patient is able to tolerate. The analyst's interpretation is rejected when (1) the interpretation has caused a degree of psychic pain which is greater than the patient's capacity to bear it; and (2) the excessive pain has seriously disturbed the transference relation which the patient needed to establish with his analyst at that moment.
The rejection of the interpretation can be classified descriptively: (1) a classic form of resistance; (2) an interruption of play; and (3) an interruption of the contact with the analyst. This differentiation is