Women and Children Last: Reflections on the History of Child Psychoanalysis

From the very first efforts to analyze children and adolescents to the present day, child and adolescent analysis has been denigrated in the analytic community. It has been viewed as “women's work” and regarded as clinically inferior to the analysis of adults. It has been seen as less important for understanding the psyche and in the training of psychoanalysts. This attitude is rationalized by observations that children and adolescents engage psychological material differently than adults do, so that, it is claimed, child and adolescent analysis is severely limited compared to adult analysis with regard to the material available for analysis. Beliefs that children require socialization lead some child analysts to indoctrinate children and sacrifice a respectful exploratory and uncovering approach. The situation of child analysis reflects larger social phenomenona, namely childism and sexism, the prejudices against children and women, as these prejudices are elaborated in our culture. Like others, child analysts respond to being the objects of prejudice by both isolating ourselves, reacting against the prejudice, and internalizing the prejudice. This paper includes clinical and institutional illustrations of these prejudices in action.