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The Subject of this Symposium, Changes in Child-Analytic technique since the publication in 1965 of Anna Freud's Normality and Pathology in Childhood, invites all sorts of responses. It might be fitting to use an earlier paper by Anna Freud and Sophie Dann (1951) as a benchmark to demonstrate changes in our theoretical understanding and their impact on technique over the past 35 years. I focus on this earlier publication because it stands out in the psychoanalytic literature as a testimony to qualities of the ego that press toward completion of development, qualities that have tended to be obscured by technical emphases on resistance to recovery and defenses against psychological growth.
The Freud-Dann paper, “An Experiment in Group Upbringing,” is a report on a group of six children who had been interred for three years in the concentration camp at Terezin, Czechoslovakia, and who, in October of 1945, were brought to Bulldogs Bank in England for resuscitation from war trauma. The report on their recovery as studied by Freud and Dann helps us to address the fundamental question of how maturation and development interact in the context of normal growth and analytic reconstitution. How is the internal biological reality of temperament made manifest in the psyche, and how are the developmental influences of social reality internalized