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Children approach analysis, as they do any new experience in life, under the guidance and authority of their parents. It has been the custom to think that the wish to please parents, the hope for gratification of secret yearnings, and the expectation of relief for current distress were mingled in varying degrees to propel them toward the new experience, while anxieties held them back. Alternatively one might think that the motivational pattern is more completely unconscious and belongs to a general category of the wish to maintain the status quo versus the drive toward integration. I do not think that these two points of view are by any means incompatible but I find the latter more in keeping with my experience and my way of describing analytic phenomena.
From this view-point a child's life at the inception of analysis would appear to be full to overflowing with objects in the outside world—parents, siblings, relatives, servants, teachers, pets, toys, machines and nature generally. While his tendency, impelled by various drives and anxieties, is to extend the boundaries of self and to engulf every new object, he also suffers from a fear of overextension—of “getting lost” in fact, and for this reason attempts to maintain a defined perimeter. The geography of this perimeter, as regards the outside world, is primarily, as in so many games, defined as the emotional distance from “home”, which is the domicile, truly, but of course fundamentally the bodies of his parents, especially mother. Thus persons and things possess a valence of positive and negative as they are felt to be friendly to the parents, the intensity of the valence varying with the degree of intimacy, friendly or hostile. It is for this reason that a phobia, for