Chapter 3: How Clinical Work with Children Can Inform the Therapist of Adults

In this volume we are reversing a process that began many years ago. Child psychoanalysis developed out of analytic work with adults; here we are considering the opposite, the contributions child analysis can make to adult analysis and to other forms of clinical work with adults. Many of the therapeutic principles that I shall discuss, principles of technique which are essential in working with children, developed because of failures of adult analytic techniques in child analysis. Failures led to new ways of thinking and the development of new techniques. I am hopeful that the theoretical and technical advances in child analysis which have enhanced work with children will also prove useful with adult patients.

Looking back to the early nineteen hundreds, when children who “wanted to get back to [their] toys” (Ferenczi, 1913, p. 244) and therapists who wanted to talk seemed to work at cross-purposes, the problems in that early work are evident. Children were expected to comply with the therapist's strategy, to talk about ideas they had not yet begun to consider. We are