Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/35

 ON THE TECHNIQUE OF CHILD -ANALYSIS 289

at repression, partly in the fact that she has less power to over- come, by way of sublimation, the incestuous impulses which are ready to burst out at this critical period.

In the case of phobia in a five year old boy, Freud has shown us the method (and this has become the basis of psycho-analytic child-therapy) by which we can throw light on these psychic depths in a small child where the libidinous stirrings change into childish anxiety. At. this stage of hfe an analysis similar to the analytic treatment of the adult is not possible. One can only apply 1 educational methods founded on psycho-analytical knowledge. A

full understanding of the child's world of thoughts and feelings will call out its unlimited confidence, and thus a way is discovered to safeguard the child from various errors and injuries. As the training of the young child, both physical and mental, rests especially with women, it becomes essential that we should train understanding and kind-hearted women for educational psycho- analytic work.

A proper analysis according to psycho-analytical principles can only be carried out after the seventh or eighth year. But even with children at this early age the analyst must, as I will show later, turn aside from the usual routine, and satisfy himself with part- ial results, where he thinks that the child might be intimidated by too powerful a stirring-up of his feelings and ideas, or that too high demands upon his powers of assimilation are being made, or that his soul is disturbed instead of freed.

Generally speaking, there are two groups of these child-patients ; namely, those who know from the beginning, or soon learn, in what the treatment consists, its aim and object, and those others who owing to their tender age, or to the fact that they do not suifer personally from their symptoms (for example, in the case of marked homosexual tendencies) or owing to individual factors (such as a feeble constitution) cannot be enlightened as to the ob- ject of the analytic treatment Such children can be safely left to the idea that the analyst spends these hours with them in order to communicate some knowledge to them or to wean them from some misbehaviour, or to play with them, or from a special inter- est in them.

For instance a delicate thirteen year old boy did not doubt for a moment that I was, as his mother said, a friend of his father who was in the war, and that I came to wish the youngster Many

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