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It is a Particular Honor to be Selected the Sole Invited Member of this meeting who is not a child analyst, though I may perhaps claim the longest personal association with child analysis of any of the participants. After brief consideration, however, I have concluded that my early experience, by which I first imagined I might establish a place for myself at this rich table of child analysts, does not enter into the scope of today's topic. I recognized that I could not escape the plain fact that my experience in treating children was confined to one year of psychiatric residency training, prior to 1965. Although I have had a good deal of experience with adolescents in psychotherapy, my experience as an analyst is entirely with adults. I cannot, from my own knowledge, say much about the current state or recent developments in child psychoanalysis. So I have elected to focus on the differences between adult analysis and what I have read and heard of child analysis.
In the years up to 1950 little attention was paid to issues of separation, either in the analysis of adults or in child analysis, although the theoretical basis for paying attention to early separations had been established in the 1920s, and Anna Freud's studies in the 1940s were known to many, if not all, analysts. An enormous upsurge of interest in separation and in the development of object relations in the 1950s