Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/37

 ON THE TECHNIQUE OF CHILD-ANALYSI S 291

successful results. An exact keeping to time appears to me of the greatest importance. It involves a self-education which the young person must undergo. Sometimes it needs strong self- control to reject some important communication which the child has kept back till the end of the hour, but to concede to such demands would mean that the patient was allowed to get the upper hand.

While the educative analysis of children of more mature age (say from fourteen to eighteen) resembles more that of the grown- up — for in the very first hours, we can speak of the factors in the treatment, of positive and negative transference, of resistance, and of the significance of the unconscious psychic tendencies in the whole of our experience — the analysis of the younger or backward child proceeds on different lines from the beginning. I consider it inadvisable to take the young patient to the con- sultation with the analyst. The child feels himself exposed and humiliated while he waits in another room during the consult- ation, and often this creates in him excitement, may be anxiety, resentment, defiance, shame, all of which endangers the subsequent treatment, or at least makes the beginning much more difficult. If one has to break down a resistance before getting an opportunity to build abridge of mutual understanding, one is, so to speak, con- fronted with a task similar to that of clearing away a heap of debris which lies at the other side of a yawning chasm.

Just as the first meeting between the analyst and the young patient should take place in the latter's home, so should it be with the treatment itself. The analysis must go on independently of the whims of the patient, who can very cleverly contrive to have a slight indisposition which prevents him coming, or arriving in time, or he may play truant in the analysis hour. The child not only lacks interest in the money problem (which for the grown-up is a continual stimulus to make him continue the treat- ment uninterruptedly), but in addition he knows that he has an opportunity of causing his parents expense and of satisfying his own defiance and desires for revenge. Of course, every child when at the height of a positive transference tries to transfer the analysis to the home of the analyst; but I have always gained the conviction that even when external circumstances demanded this change of place, such a change proved not to be lasting. How- ever much the time and energy of the analyst is burdened by