Promoting a sense of self-agency is a crucial goal of child psychoanalytic treatment. Some approaches to pathogenesis or technique risk encouraging a child to perceive himself as a passive victim of environment or constitution. Maintaining a focus on the role of internal conflict's contribution to pathogenesis helps to mitigate this tendency. In particular, the capacity to use affects as signals and the superego are important structural components to developing a sense of self-agency. The analysis of a latency-aged boy is used to demonstrate the importance of these factors and ways of analyzing that promote them.