Hug-Hellmuth, Hermine von (1921). On the technique of child-analysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2: 287–305.
Klein, Melanie (1927). Contribution to the symposium on child-analysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 8: 339–370.
Freud, Anna (1929). On the theory of analysis of children. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10: 29–38.
The Little Hans case (Freud, 1909b) showed Freud’s interest in child observation as a means of confirming psychoanalytic developmental psychology. From before the First World War, Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth was evolving a practice of psychoanalytically applied principles to treat children. The paper, republished here, by the first non-Jew to become a member of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society, proposed certain principles for child analysis (Hug-Hellmuth, 1921*). She considered that a child does not come for treatment from his or her own motivation, that the child is in the midst of the family setting in which his or her symptoms arise, so he or she is not suffering from past experiences, and the child has no concept of changing him or herself.
She made many recommendations:
In subsequent years both Anna Freud and Melanie Klein mined Hug-Hellmuth’s writings. Anna Freud tended to observe the more cautious principles, no doubt reinforced after Hug-Hellmuth’s death. She adopted these principles without acknowledgement, perhaps out of respect for Hug-Hellmuth’s wishes, but gave them a rigorous theoretical foundation (Anna Freud, 1927). Melanie Klein did acknowledge the use of play and rejected a cautious approach as indicated by one of Klein’s supporters in Berlin, Alix Strachey, who wrote in 1924: “Hug-Hellmuth’s outpourings [are] a mass of sentimentality covering the old intention of dominating at least one human being—one’s own child” (Strachey & Strachey. 1986, p. 200). Klein “wanted in the first place to separate ‘Fruhanalyse’ entirely from education (unlike Hug-Hell)” (Strachey & Strachey, 1986, p. 203).
However, despite their debt, both Anna Freud and Melanie Klein tended to be silent about Hug-Hellmuth’s contribution, and it has disappeared from view. As mentioned in the Introduction, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was murdered in 1924 by her nephew, Rudolph Hug. He was the illegitimate son of Hermine’s sister, Antonia, and Hermine adopted him as her son. She brought him up according to psychoanalytic principles, as she understood them to apply to child development. This was an old Austrian aristocratic family, which was shamed by both the illegitimate birth and the murder. However, the Viennese Society was also drastically affected by this murderous outcome of an upbringing based on psychoanalysis. It suggested a much more cautious approach to applying psychoanalysis to children—hence one of the reasons for the caution characteristic of Anna Freud’s approach.
Hug-Hellmuth’s death and the seismic tremor it created in the psychoanalytic world, together with her stiff, retiring personality, consigned her to an undeserved oblivion. Moreover, her will, made a few days before her death, stated a wish that no account of her life or work should be published, even in the psychoanalytic literature (Bernfeld, 1925, p. 106). Nevertheless, Hug-Hellmuth’s paper (and her many other writings—MacLean & Rappen, 1991) is the foundation of child analysis and her experience is as fresh today as then; hence there is good reason to republish her work.
These divergent approaches led to quite bitter exchanges later in the decade. Melanie Klein’s contribution to the symposium is republished here (Klein, 1927*). The symposium was held by the British Psychoanalytical Society, in 1927, to address Anna Freud’s criticisms (in Einführung in die Technik der Kinderanalyse; translated as Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis), is a detailed rebuttal of many points.1 Klein’s method of child analysis had been presented in the journal (and in the Zeitschrift) prior to the symposium (Klein, 1926). Here she claims, in contrast to Anna Freud, that a full analytic situation can be established with children even as young as three years of age, and that there is no need to combine psychoanalysis with an educational aim. There is opportunity, indeed need, to explore the unconscious Oedipus complex of the child to the full depths of the unconscious; and transference, both negative and positive, is fully active and analysable without the need to coax positive feelings and dissipate negative ones. Play is equivalent to free association in adults, and shows the child to be much dominated by the unconscious and by anxiety, meaning that an analysis of children needs to penetrate to the deepest layers of the unconscious. She had found that the child’s super-ego is highly active and particularly harsh. And finally she disputed that a successful analysis will harm the child’s relations with its parents.
Anna Freud made a further statement, in 1929*. This paper, republished here, was short and clinically rich, offering an elegant argument that implicitly dismissed a number of Klein’s claims. Whilst she acknowledged Melanie Klein’s play technique, Anna Freud challenged Klein’s argument that the use of pedagogic interventions diluted the psychoanalytic. In fact, Anna Freud invited child analysts to discover that precisely this educational attitude in the analyst was what made the significant difference from an adult analysis. In justification she described the formation of the superego during latency years, and its particular susceptibility to influence by external figures (as opposed to its intractable nature in older patients); and thus its openness to therapeutic influence at this age by the analyst. Implicitly, she contradicted Klein’s view of the inherent harshness of the super-ego. So, by advising the analyst of the latency child to take the opportunity to influence the superego through an educational approach, she defended the view that Klein attacked. This paper is characteristically gentle, but firm in the defence of her own technique.
The dispute over the correct method of child analysis was never resolved. Instead it evolved as Klein introduced new ideas into psychoanalysis, such as the depressive position, internal objects, and unconscious phantasy from birth. It erupted as a conflict over the progress of psychoanalytic ideas in general during the 1940s, after the Freud family had fled the Nazis and arrived in London (King & Steiner, 1991).
1. In 1947 Klein added a note to her paper indicating her belief by then that Anna Freud had moved closer to Klein’s position (see pages 168–169 of Love, Guilt and Reparation: The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1).
Bernfeld, S. (1925). Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, 6: 106–107.
Freud, A. (1927). Einfürung in die Technik der Kinderanalyse (Four Lectures on Child Analysis). Vienna: Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag.
Freud, S. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. S.E., 10: 3–149. London: Hogarth Press.
King, P., & Steiner, R. (1991). The Freud–Klein Controversies, 1941–1945. London: Routledge.
Klein, M. (1926). Infant analysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 7: 31–63.
MacLean, G., & Rappen, U. (1991). Hermine Hug-Hellmuth: Her Life and Work. London: Routledge.
Strachey, J., & Strachey, A. (1986). Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–1925. P. Meisel & W. Kendrick (Eds.). London: Chatto and Windus.
H. Von Hug-Hellmuth
The answer to technical problems in psycho-analytic practice is never obvious.
Freud: Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, IV. Folge.
The analysis both of the child and of the adult has the same end and object; namely, the restoration of the psyche to health and equilibrium which have been endangered through influences known and unknown.
The task of the physician is fulfilled when a cure has been effected, no matter what ethical and social standards the patient pursues; it suffices that the individual becomes once more adapted to life and his vocation, and that he is no longer liable to succumb to the demands and disappointments of life.
The curative and educative work of analysis does not consist only in freeing the young creature from his sufferings, it must also furnish him with moral and aesthetic values. The object of such curative and educative treatment is not the mature man who when freed is able to take responsibility for his own actions: but the child, the adolescent, that is human beings who are still in the developing stage, who have to be strengthened through the educative guidance of the analyst, in order to become human beings with strong wills and definite aims. He who is both analyst and educator must never forget that the aim of child-analysis is character-analysis—in other words, education.
The peculiarity of the child-psyche, its special relationship to the outside world, necessitates a special technique for its analysis.
There are three considerations of fundamental importance:
For instance, a small boy, a habitual pilferer, whom I had for treatment, took all his experiences in school and at home just as “a lark” and squared his conscience in regard to his complete failure at school with the reflection: “My father did not like learning either, and yet we are doing so well.” Another twelve-year-old boy, a little truant, whom I analysed in the Vienna children’s clinic, enjoyed his stay there so much, on account of the nice food he got, that in spite of his often expressed longing for his parents, he had no desire whatever to depart.
Experience has taught me that girls at the age of puberty are more helpless when confronted by conflicts in the home life, and more sensitive to them, than are boys of the same age. The explanation of this lies partly in the fact that the girl has stronger links with her home life on account of her education aiming more at repression, partly in the fact that she has less power to overcome, 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 life an analysis similar to the analytic treatment of the adult is not possible. One can only apply 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 psychoanalytic 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 partial 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 suffer 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 object 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 interest 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 Happy Returns of the Day. As he had an impediment in his speech he also accepted quite trustingly the further explanation that I would teach him to speak distinctly, and he actually tried himself to speak more clearly.
The mother of an eleven-year-old boy, who lived completely in his phantasies and dreams, chose, without my sanction, a form of introduction which I thought might have proved harmful. She said that a friend of hers was very much interested in children’s dreams and would like him to talk to her about his own. However the course of the analysis convinced me that no harm had been done, for the somewhat artificial accounts of dreams given in the beginning were after all only reflections of his conscious and unconscious day-dreams.
No rule can be laid down for the appropriate moment to tell the patient the aim of these talks; experience and personal tact are the only reliable guides.
In close connection with the above matter is the formulating of the obligations which must be carried out by the adult patient at the beginning as a sine qua non if a cure is to be effected. Right from the beginning one understands that in the case of the second type of psycho-analytic patients one must abandon the demand for absolute openness, and uncensored expression of everything which comes into the mind, and instead put forward this obligation only at some favourable opportunity. In the case of the first-mentioned group, however, those more mature young people who often have already had instruction concerning psycho-analysis from some other member of the family who has already undergone treatment, it is often suitable in the very first hour to demand that they shall be completely frank and shall not talk over the treatment with their comrades, their brothers and sisters, or other members of the family. Of course, in connection with this enjoining of secrecy, we must not overlook that commands and prohibitions are the very means of tempting the young to transgress.
The period of time devoted to the child’s analysis is generally conditioned by the attendance at school, which the parents do not want on any account to be shortened. Apart from the few cases where the young patient has special difficulties in preserving the continuity, I have always found that three or four hours a week, if the analysis is carried on long enough, leads to 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 consultation with the analyst. The child feels himself exposed and humiliated while he waits in another room during the consultation, 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 a bridge of mutual understanding, one is, so to speak, confronted with a task similar to that of clearing away a heap of débris 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 treatment 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. However much the time and energy of the analyst is burdened by this demand, since he can only see daily half the number of patients as compared with those treated by his medical colleagues, and although an absolutely undisturbed and private talk in the patient’s own house is difficult to obtain, nevertheless these evils seem to me trifling compared with the greater one of letting the child decide the external conditions of the analysis. Another consideration is that the parents, in spite of all their devotion, very soon feel that chaperoning of the child to and from the analyst’s house becomes impossible and this difficulty is used as a reason for terminating the treatment—a situation well-known to every child-analyst.
However favourable may be a temporary absence from home for difficult children, nevertheless I have my doubts as to the value of psycho-analytic treatment for them in any kind of institution, whether they are boarders or day-pupils, for one reason because the child finds the necessity for secrecy in a situation where he feels himself more important than his comrades very difficult to endure, and for another, because he easily becomes a target for their ridicule when he has to have a special “treatment hour”, about the aim and object of which the other children cannot obtain information. What the treatment will be like in future happier times when perhaps some of my ideas for the founding of psycho-analytic homes for young children have been realized I cannot foretell, but I believe that it will need quite special tact, great educational skill and experience, to meet successfully the great difficulties which will arise in psycho-analytic treatment owing to collective life. The jealousy among the patients themselves, the making of comparisons not always favourable to one’s own analyst, the exchange of confidences between the children about their analysis which cannot be prevented—all these things are difficulties which must not be underrated. Nevertheless, I believe that the creation of psychoanalytic “homes” will either solve the problem of the guidance of the “difficult” child which so many parents and schools fail in, or at least make the problem easier.
An important difference between the analysis of the child and of the grown-up results from what seems a merely external circumstance; namely, whether the patient should lie down or sit up during treatment. For the very juvenile patient, this question is already answered by the limitations which his age imposes. But also in the case of the older child the notion of “lying down” produces in the child an anxiety-situation. To lie down awakens in the child the memory of some real or imagined scene of being overpowered: one will be afraid of a beating, another of an operation, and both are overcome by their secret feeling of guilt, a fear of castration. Adolescent patients imagine themselves while lying down to be under hypnosis and exposed to rape. Seduction phantasies of both homosexual and heterosexual nature which are projected on to the analyst play a great part with so-called “nervous” boys and girls when they have to lie down.
A fifteen-year-old boy who came for my educative treatment on account of a serious phobia of thunderstorms and earthquakes, confessed to me in the course of analysis that he would certainly have resisted the treatment if he had been obliged to lie down on the sofa which, he had heard, a family acquaintance had had to do in his analysis, for he was in continual dread of being hypnotized. As a matter of fact this boy had worked himself into such a serious condition of excitement during a consultation with a nerve specialist at home, who tried to hypnotize him, that he cried out “Police” and finally dashed out of the house in a panic into the street.
I have never noticed that the success of the analysis is in any way imperilled by the fact that the analyst faces the patient.
The first hour in treatment is of the utmost importance; it is the opportunity for establishing a rapport with the young creature, and for “breaking the ice”. It causes much strain and stress to the beginner and opens up even to the experienced analyst nearly always new methods of approach and new guiding lines. But no rules and no programme can be laid down; the intellectual development, the age, and the temperament of the patient must decide which course to pursue.
In the case of more mature patients, often the right course is for the analyst to confess himself as such openly, in order to gain their confidence whole heartedly.
The mother of a nervous girl of fourteen introduced me to her daughter as a friend whom she had not seen for many years, but the girl was not to be deceived by this; after a little while she enquired: “But who are you really?” My honest explanation, namely, that I was interested in young people who find life very difficult and are unable to grapple with it, and that I should like to help her, too, to get on better with her mother, had the desired effect. The girl became strongly attached to me and came to me for advice about all matters which disturbed her, as to her “second and real mother”.
Sometimes, in the case of those patients who obstinately shut themselves up, a ruse is helpful. For example, a nine-year-old boy with suicidal impulses, during the first hour took not the slightest notice of me, but simply laid his head on the table and made no response to any remark. A fly passing close to my face suggested to me the idea of pretending that I had got something in my eye. At once the boy, who always wished to be in the limelight, jumped up, saying: “Please let me see, I will get it out; but you must not rub your eye.” Thus, with his proffered help the ice was broken, because he felt himself of use to me. Every time, after this, when a strong resistance made him retire into silence, I had only to ask for his advice or his help, and the analysis once more progressed favourably.
A ruse, which, in my opinion, never fails, is to tell the young patient about the misdeeds of other children. As one has already been sufficiently informed by the parents about the misdemeanours and peculiarities of one’s little patient, one need not be afraid of inciting the child, by such accounts of others, to similar naughtiness which he has not indulged in up to the present. No child has so far been harmed either in a sexual, or any other way, by a properly-conducted analysis. Though a temporary increase in bad behaviour may lead the layman to such an idea, the analyst is able to appreciate it as a sign of progress.
The reaction of the child to this kind of beginning may be of three types. Often the patient reacts with a story of similar misdeeds, which at first are described as having been done by another child, and only later on admitted as his own. Or secondly he may reply with a fierce denial: “I have never done such things!” From the analysis of the grown-up, we are aware that such emphatic denials are tantamount to admissions. Thirdly, the child may accept the information with absolute indifference. Then we can scarcely be wrong in assuming that the parents have misunderstood something in the behaviour of the child, or that behind the known facts something more is hidden.
When dealing with children of seven or eight years of age, the analyst can often pave the way by sharing in the play activities, and thus he can recognise several symptoms, peculiar habits, and character traits; and in the case of these very young patients, very often play will enact an important part throughout the whole treatment.
A seven-year-old boy, who suffered from severe insomnia accompanied with compulsive laughter and tic, which made me suspect he had watched the parental sex-life, manifested during daytime complete apathy: he lay on the carpet for hours without speaking or playing; he ate a great deal but without enjoyment or selection, and apparently had lost quite suddenly his former strongly-marked desire for caresses. In the analysis he would allow me to play with his toys for the whole hour, with scarcely any reaction on his part, and seldom gave me answer, so that it was difficult to decide whether he had taken in at all that I said. In one of the first treatment hours I told him about a little boy who would not go to sleep at night, and made such a noise that his parents could not sleep either. I told also how little Rudi made a noise too in the afternoons when his father wanted to rest; so his father became angry and Rudi was whipped (Little Hans’s reaction to this was to run to the sideboard and take down a “Krampus’1 and to beat me on the arm, saying: “You are naughty!”). I went on to tell how Rudi was then cross with his father, and wished his father were somewhere else. (To this the reaction was: “My father is at the war.” Actually his father, an officer of high rank, was on active service throughout the war, and had only returned to his family in Vienna on short leave.) Suddenly Hans took his little gun and said: “Puff, puff.”
The next day his death-wishes towards his father showed themselves more clearly. He was playing with his toy motor-car and several times ran over the chauffeur, whom I had made out to be little Rudi’s father. I pretended to telephone the news of his father’s accident to the little boy. Rudi was supposed to weep bitterly at the news, and then I said that although Rudi had formerly wished his strict father away, now he felt very sad, because in spite of this wish, he really loved his father very much. The reaction of little Hans was very characteristic; he listened to me, lying on the floor, asking me eagerly now and then, “What does little Rudi do next?” Suddenly he jumped up and ran out of the room. On the following day he reacted in the same way when our game was repeated, at his request. In his sudden going out of the room, we can see clearly the working of the unconscious. It also shows us an important difference in the course of psychic functionings in the grown-up and in the child. Whereas in the analysis of the adult, we aim at bringing about full insight into unconscious impulses and feelings, in the case of a child, this kind of avowal expressed, without words, in a symbolic act, is quite sufficient. We learn, indeed, from the analysis of the child that in him the psychic events take place in quite different layers from those of the grown-up, that they may be more closely or more remotely connected with each other and that in the child many impressions leave clearly-marked traces in spite of never having reached the threshold of consciousness. Even analysis does not make conscious these fragmentary memories of “primordial scenes”2 the blending of new impressions with these former takes place, perhaps, in the preconscious, and it is left to later experiences at a higher stage of development to bring them into consciousness. This would supply a further explanation of the fact that the very earliest impressions which are very much alike for all human beings (such for example, as the methods of upbringing) lay the foundation for neurosis in some whilst others pass through them unharmed.
It is most rare for the young patient to put out his psychic feelers, or to talk freely during the first treatment hour, since he is full of mistrust towards his analyst, who is the father- or mother-imago, unless it so happens that an extreme bitterness against his parents or brothers and sisters compels the child to break out into complaints and abuse. In such case, it is necessary to manifest to the young patient the greatest forbearance and a full consideration of his troubles.
The communications or symptomatic actions in the first treatment hour are of the greatest importance, for they demonstrate the nuclear-complex of the infantile neurosis.
A fifteen-year-old boy came to me for analytic treatment on account of severe anxiety conditions, which he himself speedily declared to be “anxiety of anxiety”. The first thing he said was: “In our form at school, the two best pupils are Jews, I come next, and again after that, the next best are Jews, and the rest are Gentiles.” By this formulation the boy betrayed his ever-gnawing feeling of reproach against the father, who owing to marriage with a Gentile, had become a convert from Judaism to Protestantism.
Little Hans, to whom we are indebted for valuable insight into the mechanism of the child’s psychic functioning, was aroused from his complete apathy by the following game: I saw in the looking-glass that he poked his finger into his nose, and I said: “Oh dear, whatever is Hans doing? I don’t want to see such a sight!” Whereupon he stood in front of the mirror, smiling roguishly, and said. “Don’t look!” poking his finger again into his nose. Of course he expects me to forbid him and untiringly repeats this game, only exchanging his nose-poking for putting out his tongue. This game symbolizes to him the oft-experienced strictness of his father which he tries to evade by keeping secret his little misdeed.
A sixteen-year-old girl suffered in a marked degree from inferiority feelings, owing to squinting. She covered up spontaneously my spectacles which lay on the table—a symptomatic action which revealed that she was unwilling to be reminded of eyes or their abnormalities. She admitted to me later on that this defect of mine had for a long time disturbed her affectionate relations towards me.
A ten-year-old boy, who was rather a failure at his work owing to his very extreme habit of phantasying, in the first treatment hour informed me how greatly he disliked the pose of the hero in a performance of Lohengrin which he had witnessed. He ostentatiously turned his back towards me, imitating the singer’s position, declaring it unsuitable for a performer on the stage, asking me: “Surely, Doctor, an actor should not stand in such a position in front of the public?” After a short course of analysis, my original suspicion was confirmed, namely, that the boy was suffering from a strongly repressed exhibitionism.
The first communication of a fourteen-year-old girl, who was harrassed by painful broodings, was a very contemptuous criticism of the geographical teaching which she received at the age of ten or eleven, which consisted of continual repetition about “climate” and even now in the high school it was the same subject all over again: climate, the position of the sun and its shadow—these were pursued with the same persistency. “Whatever is the object of teaching the movements of the sun to an eleven-year-old child who cares nothing about the subject,” and so forth—this complaint filled up the whole hour of treatment with the greatest monotony, and in the subsequent hours she continually returned to this subject, until at last was revealed the connection between this question and what was really the girl’s main interest—sexual intercourse between human beings. In a roundabout way (first under the guise of her great liking for horses—she was greatly interested in books on horse-breeding—then of her interest in descriptions of travels and the love relations of foreign peoples) the main preoccupation finally emerged: “For how long a period do the men and women of foreign races have intimate relations with one another” (having in mind her own father and mother).
The demand for “active therapy” which is made for the analysis of the adult is also of importance in child-analysis. It is certainly advisable for quite a number of patients that during the course of analysis they should be given small tasks to perform. Especially in the case of the patient who suffers from strong inferiority feelings, if a due measure of work be demanded of him, his self-confidence will be strengthened.
The shy, dependent weak boy (of whom I spoke above) who had difficulty with his speech and suffered a great deal from the ridicule of street-boys, surprised his grandfather after a six months treatment by his manly self-reliant behaviour with his seniors. The boy, who formerly would scarcely go outside the house, improved so much by analysis that he joined in walks, and went along, first for me, then for his mother, to execute little commissions for us—which he carried out very successfully.
More important than making positive requests is the avoidance, as far as possible, of any direct prohibitions, and, again, more valuable than both prohibitions and commissions, is talking over things together. This mutual weighing up of the pros and cons of a given situation will influence the self-confidence of the patient repressed by his inferiority feelings.
No more for the child than for the adult can a programme for the course of analysis be laid down. Kind and sympathetic attention, encouraging occasionally, joking words at the right moment, a loving interest in all the trifles which are by no means trifles to the child, indicate the way to gain the full confidence of the young creature. In addition, to forget nothing and to confuse nothing said in previous sittings—this completes the demands made by the child upon the analyst. How far, and when, free association should be made use of, can only be decided as the circumstances arise. So far as my own experience goes, Abraham’s remark that older people need more guidance in analysis than the younger ones holds good for both the young child and the adolescent. Perhaps we would add that in the case of these latter, greater care has to be used than with the grown-up. True, it is difficult to disentangle deep-rooted and rigid ideas and feelings, but the greater plasticity of the youthful mind lends itself easily to the danger of unintended suggestion instead of yielding to the patient the clearest possible insight. Over and over again I have been able to prove to myself that children know far more about the things that go on in their surroundings than we grown-ups, owing to our anxious solicitude, wish to admit. Does it not sound almost tragi-comic to receive unexpectedly the confession of an eleven-year-old girl (whose repeated questions about the sexual act I have carefully tried to answer step by step) that when she was five her mother enticed her to look through the keyhole and thus spy on her father when having intercourse with a prostitute!
Of course, dreams play their part in child-analysis also, but we need not fear, any more than in the case of adults, that resistance will produce a more intense or imaginary dream-experience. The so-called night-dream signifies only a day-dream to which perhaps the child would never otherwise give expression. And here I wish to emphasize the difficulty there is in getting some children to speak out freely all their ideas because they cannot free themselves from the habit fixed by the daily teaching, namely: “not to talk nonsense” and so forth.
Although naturally in child-analysis technical expressions, such as the Oedipus and castration-complex, exhibitionism, etc. cannot be made use of, nevertheless the real facts must be made clear. Even in the case of a very young patient it is necessary to explain certain phenomena in the course of treatment. He will quite easily understand the meaning of “resistance” if first it is explained to him in connection with “the negative transference”, that is, his refusal to speak out of a spirit of defiance; and later in connection with the “positive transference”, that is, his feeling of shame at making a confession to the analyst which is humiliating to himself or his family; and in the end he will understand the readily acquired phrase: “Now I have no more to say”.
Out of the resistance which expresses itself in the form of unwillingness to humiliate his family we can find a way of explanation concerning the negative transference, which is generally much more readily accepted than the idea of the positive transference. Discussion about this latter, even when it is quite clearly recognised, demands special caution in formulating it, because at bottom the child is unwilling to exchange his own parents for any stranger, even when there is every good reason for so doing. In spite of this, however, the child’s first attitude at the beginning of the treatment is generally a strong positive transference, owing to the fact that the analyst, by sympathetic and dispassionate listening, realizes the child’s secret father—or mother—ideal. Of course he makes use of this attitude at once against his own family. This results in those intensely irritating remarks made by the child to his people, such as: “Doctor said I need not do this or that”, or, “I must ask Doctor first about this”. The child takes for granted that the analyst by listening to his complaints in the treatment hour, is in agreement with him, and from this he builds up his phantasies and attributes to them the value of reality. Also the juvenile patient is continually ready to plot against his parents, and in this he relies upon the support of his analyst. The child, just like the grown-up, when at the height of his positive transference, is unwilling to end the treatment.
The negative transference usually appears first in the form of a fear of being deceived. For everything they say, they demand oaths of secrecy, for their mistrust towards the analyst is the product both of unwillingness to lay themselves bare, and of the countless disappointments which even the most favourable home conditions provide for the child from his earliest years. This is also the reason why he anxiously and jealously watches the interviews between the analyst and his parents and tries to overhear them and shorten them.
We know what an important part is played in the child’s psychic life by sexuality, and its observation, and by the diverting of this childish interest by the family circle. The child is accustomed to get very unsatisfactory answers from his parents and other grown-up members of the family to the riddle of sex, and therefore he reacts in two ways to the straight-forward talk in the analysis about sexual matters. He feels more important, like a grown-up man, and tries hard to reward the analyst’s frankness by greater friendship: on the other hand, as soon as stronger resistance sets in, he is at once ready (owing to his earlier repressions) to belittle the analyst because he has talked on tabooed matters. So strong with the child is the parental authority and the first educational influence, that he expects the same claims to be made upon himself, and the same outlook in life, from every grown-up who is interested in him. To him the analyst embodies, but in much stronger form than to the adult, the father- or mother-imago. On that account it takes a long time before he can feel convinced that the analyst does not take the parent’s part, and that he can expect from the analyst full freedom and complete understanding for all his utterances. The child’s overestimation of authority, in both positive and negative sense, makes the analysis difficult, for the patient watches with a keen eye for any defect in the analyst which will give him an excuse for gainsaying his belief in authority. And the young person, especially the child, thinks he finds this wished-for defect in the analyst’s frank talk about sexual problems, and therefore in this phase of the treatment the ambivalency of the patient towards his guide and adviser is most apparent. The notable difference between his parents as they are in reality and their image in his phantasy re-awakens once more in its original intensity the very earliest child-wish, namely, that his little heart should once more be able to confide in his father and mother and with this all the old feelings of early disappointment are revived. Owing to this unavoidable conflict which has its foundation in the childish memories of the young soul, and in its attitude to the analyst, arise the fundamental demands made upon the latter by the patient. The chief thing in the analysis of children and young people is the analyst’s power of intuition in regard to the sufferer. It does not matter so much whether many complexes are made conscious to the young patient, or how much “insight” he gains, the reaction is sufficient at the beginning. Often, much later, some chance word from the child shows that he has preserved and appreciated at its true value the explanation which he had at an earlier stage. But this acceptance does not take place by means of conscious work: a great part of the psycho-analytic process in the child takes place in his unconscious, and contrary to the case of the grown-up, it remains permanently there, and only a change in his behaviour proves to the analyst that his trouble has not been in vain. In my experience, it is those children whose seeming compliance might tempt one to satisfaction, who are the most difficult type for treatment: they are the well-drilled kind, who say “yes” to everything, but in their hearts say “no” and act accordingly.
Intuition and patience, these are the foundations which must be laid from the first meeting with the young patient, in order that confidence may rest on solid ground.
An important factor in child-analysis is the relationship between the analyst and the young patient’s family. One might think that in this respect the analyst-educator would have an advantage over his medical colleagues, since the child comes for treatment owing to the parents’ wish, whereas the adult comes of his own accord, very often quite against the wish of his family. Unfortunately this idea is quite incorrect. In the case of the child as well, psycho-analysis is looked upon as the last resource, and the parents, who have found all other educational measures fail, have a good deal of mistrust even of psycho-analysis. In spite of this, they expect a “miraculous cure” which shall remedy in the course of days the mistakes of years. And the relatives cling to this expectation, in spite of the analyst’s quite explicit information that the duration of the treatment cannot be fixed in advance because it is dependent upon the individual character of the child, but that it will certainly stretch over several months. I have proved over and over again that the relatives from the very beginning of the treatment have privately settled in their own minds a time-limit, and this they maintain, incapable of sufficient insight to understand that to break off treatment half-way through means waste of time, trouble, and money. Of course, the psycho-analytic treatment itself is held responsible for the consequence of the premature breaking-off, namely, that there is a considerable intensification of the original trouble—and this is produced by the child (in part consciously, in part unconsciously) owing to his revolt against the loss of treatment which though at first compulsory has become indispensable to him. The parents’ criticism of the treatment is made more poignant owing to their painful consciousness, mingled with shame, anxiety and bitterness, of having failed in regard to their children’s successful training. In addition the knowledge that the analysis reveals all the mistakes made in the upbringing of the child in spite of the best intentions, and that the analyst obtains an insight (very undesirable from the parents’ point of view), into intimate family affairs creates in most parents distrustful and anxious feelings. This reluctance to lay bare family affairs proves a greater hindrance in the case of child-analysis than in the case of the adult, for the latter is willing to sacrifice, for the sake of his own recovery, the consideration he holds for his family. Another difficulty arises from the overanxiety of the parents to further and hasten the analysis by their co-operation. The mothers, at all events, nearly always show a desire to make use of “active therapy”. It is terribly difficult to convince them that their work lies in quite another direction and that they are really acting as helpers if they show the child during the treatment the greatest possible measure of patience and forbearance. They must develop the understanding that the young mind during the analysis has to go through a process of re-crystallization, during which first the old values are destroyed; and this destructive process cannot take place without disturbances, and these shocks have an outlet in an increase of the very difficulties and peculiarities which have to be eliminated. Quite usually after a striking temporary improvement in the symptoms (arousing in the parents premature expectation of cure in a few weeks or even hours in spite of the analyst’s emphatic warning as to the duration of the analysis) a marked change for the worse takes place. Some children rebel more violently than ever against the parents’ rules and regulations: others who have failed in their work owing to their extreme phantasy-life, will take advantage of the unwonted freedom to express now without check their secret thoughts and feelings. They lose themselves in their day-dreams, and for the time being, they turn away from their work more completely than before. This apparent deterioration in the outward behaviour of the child, which reveals his psychic condition, is regarded quite differently by the parents and by the analyst: the latter sees in it a good sign for the further progress of the analysis.
It is not easy to convince the parents that the renunciation of the desire for the children’s success in work during the process of analysis holds out the promise of that very success when the treatment is over. They are very unwilling to allow as much importance to a psychic trouble as to a physical one. Just as no father would think of sending his child to school when suffering from pneumonia, so no demands must be made for study from the child suffering psychically.
The narcissism of the parents explains their extreme jealousy, experienced especially by the mother, when they see their child so ardently attaching himself to the analyst. In this connection an important task devolves upon the analyst who has to explain to the mother that the positive transference is a passing phenomen but one necessary to the success of the analysis, and in no way deprives her permanently of her child’s love.
In spite of the difficulties which prevent the relations between the parents and analyst being so friendly as might be desirable in the interests of the child, this relationship is inevitable. It is a legitimate demand on the part of the parents and furthers the treatment. For the child passes over, instinctively and, unlike the adult, without conscious criticism, everything which has no “feeling-tone” for him and which is settled and done with. Consequently, very often we learn nothing in the analysis of difficulties at home or at school, because the child does not feel the need to revise these scenes, and his interest in them disappears as soon as they have played their part according to his expectations. In addition we must not forget that the child consciously also keeps secrets. In order to ascertain some special date, or the accuracy of some memory, it is sometimes useful to question the parents; and further it is valuable for obtaining an insight into the earliest stage of the patient’s life. It is here that the parents can satisfy their desire for active co-operation in the analysis, by means of written replies to the analyst’s series of questions, concerning the physical and psychic development of the child in early infancy, and these communications throw a valuable light upon the surroundings, the outlook on life and the educational system in which the child has grown up. It is of special importance in the process of analysis to refrain from touching on certain matters, such as infantile masturbation and how it ceased, and to overlook a decided denial in respect to certain matters which we all know (just like the interest in the digestive process, etc.) must be answered in the affirmative by every child. This emphatic denial of all kinds of “nastiness” affords the analyst guiding-lines for the treatment of the sexual problem.
I consider it impossible for anyone to analyse properly his own child. This is so not only because the child hardly ever reveals its deepest desires and thoughts, conscious or unconscious, to father and mother, but because in this case the analyst is often driven to re-construct too freely, and also because the narcissism of the parents would make it almost unbearable to hear from their own child the psycho-analytic revelations.
The relations between the analyst and the patient’s brothers and sisters has also a bearing on the course of the treatment. Usually the younger ones are eager to share the patient’s confidence, whereas the elder ones, owing to a secret feeling of envy and animosity, and a half-expectation of betrayal of themselves, keep aloof. Both of these attitudes are judged with equal hostility by the patient, who watches with jealous mistrust the relations of his special confidant with his brothers and sisters and is unwilling to give up his phantasy of the analyst’s hostile attitude towards the latter.
We may sum up our knowledge obtained from child-analysis in a few sentences. Almost always we find mistakes in education, through which a bad disposition or a harmful experience, instead of decreasing in destructive effects, is fostered. Too much strictness on the one hand, and too much leniency on the other, with nearly always a lack of consistency in the upbringing, bring about these evils, from which both parents and children alike suffer. If the parents themselves were analysed, in all probability fewer children would be in need of analysis.
1. The dressed-up figure of a little man, holding a birch-rod.
2. Cf. Freud: A child is being beaten, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I, p. 380.
Melanie Klein
I will begin my remarks with a short retrospect of the development of child-analysis in general. Its beginnings date from the year 1909, when Freud published the “Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy”. This publication was of the greatest theoretical importance, confirming as it did in the person of the child who was its subject the truth of what Freud, proceeding from the analysis of adults, had discovered to exist in children. The paper had, however, yet another significance, the greatness of which could not at that time at all be gauged. This analysis was destined to be the foundation-stone of subsequent child-analysis. For not only did it show the presence and the evolution of the Oedipus complex in children and demonstrate the forms in which it operates in them; it showed also that these unconscious tendencies could safely and most profitably be brought into consciousness. Freud himself describes this discovery as follows:1
But I must now inquire what harm was done to Hans by dragging to light in him complexes such as are not only repressed by children but dreaded by their parents. Did the little boy proceed to take some serious action as regards what he wanted from his mother? or did his evil intentions against his father give place to evil deeds? Such misgivings will no doubt have occurred to many doctors, who misunderstand the nature of psycho-analysis and think that wicked instincts are strengthened by being made conscious.2
And again, on p. 285:
On the contrary, the only results of the analysis were that Hans recovered, that he ceased to be afraid of horses and that he got on to rather familiar terms with his father, as the latter reported with some amusement. But whatever his father may have lost in the boy’s respect he won back in his confidence: “I thought”, said Hans, “you knew everything as you knew that about the horse”. For analysis does not undo the effects of repression. The instincts which were formerly suppressed remain suppressed; but the same effect is produced in a different way. Analysis replaces the process of repression, which is an automatic and excessive one, by a temperate and purposeful control on the part of the highest mental faculties. In a word, analysis replaces repression by condemnation. This seems to bring us the long-looked-for evidence that consciousness has a biological function, and that with its entrance upon the scene an important advantage is secured.
H. Hug-Hellmuth, who had the honourable distinction of having been the first to undertake the systematic analysis of children, approached her task with certain preconceptions in her mind, which she also retained to the last. In her paper entitled “On the technique of child-analysis”, written after four years’ work in this field, which gives us the clearest idea of her principles and her technique,3 she makes it very clear that she deprecated the idea of analysing very young children, that she considered it necessary to content oneself with “partial success” and not to penetrate too deep in analysis with children, for fear of stirring up too powerfully the repressed tendencies and impulses or of making demands which their powers of assimilation are unable to meet.
From this paper, as well as from her other writings, we know that she shrank from penetrating at all deeply into the Oedipus complex. Another assumption to which she held in her work was that in the case of children not only analytic treatment but also a definite educative influence is required of the analyst.
As early as 1921, when I published my first paper “The development of a child”,4 I had arrived at very different conclusions. In my analysis of a boy of five and a quarter I found (what all my later analyses confirmed) that it was perfectly possible and also salutary to probe the Oedipus complex to its depths and that by so doing one could obtain results at least equal to those of adult analysis. But, side by side with this, I found out that in an analysis so conducted not only was it unnecessary for the analyst to endeavour to exert an educative influence but that the two things were incompatible. I took these discoveries as the guiding principles in my work and advocated them in all my writings, and this is how I have come to attempt the analysis of quite little children, that is, from three to six years old, and to find it both successful and full of promise.
Let us now first of all select from Anna Freud’s book what seem to be her four principal points. Here we meet again with the fundamental idea which we have already mentioned as being also H. Hug-Hellmuth’s, namely, the conviction that the analysis of children should not be pressed too far. By this, as is clear also from the more immediate conclusions drawn, is meant that the child’s relation to the parents should not be too much handled, that is, that the Oedipus complex must not be searchingly examined. The examples which Anna Freud gives do in fact show no analysis of the Oedipus complex.
The second leading idea is, here again, that the analysis of children should be combined with exerting an educational influence upon them.
It is remarkable and should give food for thought that, though child-analysis was first attempted some eighteen years ago and has been practised ever since, we have to face the fact that its most fundamental principles have not yet been clearly enunciated. If we compare with this fact the development of adult psychoanalysis we shall find that, within a similar period of time, all the basic principles for the latter work were not only laid down but were empirically tested and proved beyond refutation, and that a technique was evolved the details of which had certainly to be perfected but whose fundamental principles have remained unshaken.
What is the explanation of the fact that just the analysis of children should have been so much less fortunate in its development? The argument often heard in analytical circles that children are not suitable objects for analysis does not seem to be valid. H. Hug-Hellmuth was indeed very sceptical about the results to be obtained with children. She said she “had to content herself with partial success and also to reckon with relapses”. Moreover she restricted the treatment to a limited number of cases. Anna Freud also sets very definite limits to its applicability, but on the other hand she takes a more optimistic view than did H. Hug-Hellmuth of the potentialities of child-analysis. At the end of her book she says: “In child-analysis, in spite of all the difficulties I have enumerated, we do bring about changes, improvements and cures such as we dare not even dream of in analysing adults” (p. 86).
In order to answer the question I have suggested, I want now to make certain statements which it will be my business to prove as I go on. I think that child-analysis, as compared with that of adults, has developed so much less favourably in the past because it was not approached in a spirit of free and unprejudiced enquiry, as adult analysis was, but was hampered and burdened from the outset by certain preconceptions. If we look back at that first child-analysis, the foundation of all others (that of little Hans), we discover that it did not suffer from this limitation. Certainly there was as yet no special technique: the child’s father who carried out this partial analysis under Freud’s directions was quite unversed in the practice of analysis. In spite of this he had the courage to go quite a long way in the analysis and his results were good. In the summary to which I referred earlier in this article Freud says that he himself would have liked to go further. What he says shows, too, that he did not see any danger in a thorough analysis of the Oedipus complex, so evidently he did not think that this complex should on grounds of principle be left unanalysed in children. But H. Hug-Hellmuth, who for so many years was almost alone and certainly pre-eminent in this field of work, approached it from the outset with principles which were bound to limit it and therefore make it less fruitful, not only in respect of its practical results, the number of cases in which analysis was to be used, etc., but also in respect of theoretical findings. For, during all these years, child-analysis, which might have reasonably been expected to contribute directly to the development of psycho-analytical theory, has done nothing in this direction worth speaking of. Anna Freud, as well as H. Hug-Hellmuth, has the idea that in analysing children we can discover not only no more, but actually less about the early period of life than when we analyse adults.
Here I come upon another pretext which is put forward as a reason for the slow progress made in the field of child-analysis. It is said that a child’s behaviour in analysis is obviously different from that of an adult, and that therefore a different technique must be used. I think this argument is incorrect. If I may adapt the saying, “It is the spirit which builds the body”, I should like to maintain that it is the attitude, the inner conviction which finds the necessary technique. I must reiterate what I have said: if one approaches child-analysis with an open mind one will discover ways and means of probing to the deepest depths. And then, from the results of the procedure one will realize what is the child’s true nature and will perceive that there is no need to impose any restriction on the analysis, either as to the depth to which it may penetrate or the method by which it may work.
In what I have now said I have already touched on the principal point in my criticism of Anna Freud’s book.
A number of technical devices employed by Anna Freud may, I think, be explained from two points of view: (1) she assumes that the analytic situation cannot be established with children; and (2) in the case of children she regards pure analysis without any pedagogic admixture as unsuitable or questionable.
The first thesis follows directly from the assumption of the second.
If we compare this with the technique of adult analysis, we perceive that we assume unconditionally that a true analytic situation can be brought about only by analytic means. We should regard it as a grave error to ensure for ourselves a positive transference from the patient by employing measures such as Anna Freud describes in Chapter One of her book, or to utilize his anxiety in order to make him submissive, or otherwise to intimidate or win him over by means of authority. We should think that even if such an introduction as this secured for us partial access to the patient’s Ucs, we yet could never expect to establish a true analytic situation and to carry through a complete analysis which should penetrate the deeper layers of the mind. We know that we constantly have to analyse the fact that patients wish to see us as an authority—whether a hated or a loved one—and that only by analysing this attitude do we gain access to these deeper layers.
All the means which we should regard as incorrect in the analysis of adults are specially stressed by Anna Freud as valuable in analysing children, the object being that introduction to the treatment which she believes to be necessary and which she calls the “breaking-in” to analysis. It would appear obvious that after this “breaking-in” she will never wholly succeed in establishing a true analytic situation. Now I think it surprising and illogical that Anna Freud, who does not use the necessary measures to establish the analytic situation but substitutes others at variance with these, yet continually refers to her assumption, and tries to prove it theoretically, that it is not possible to establish an analytic situation with children nor, therefore, to carry through with them a pure analysis in the sense of adult analysis.
Anna Freud gives a number of reasons to justify the elaborate and troublesome means which she considers it necessary to employ with children in order to bring about a situation which shall make analytic work possible. These reasons do not seem to me sound. She departs in so many respects from the proved analytic rules, because she thinks that children are such different beings from adults. Yet the sole purpose of all these elaborate measures is to make the child like the adult in his attitude to analysis. This seems contradictory and I think is to be explained by the fact that in her comparisons Anna Freud puts the Cs and the ego of the child and the adult in the foreground, while we (though we give all necessary consideration to the ego) surely have to work first and foremost with the Ucs. But in the Ucs (and here I am basing my statement on deep analytical work with both children and adults) the former are by no means so fundamentally different from the latter. It is only that in children the ego has not yet attained to its full development, and therefore they are very much more under the sway of their Ucs. It is this which we must approach and this that we must regard as the central point of our work if we want to learn to know children as they really are and to analyse them.
I do not attach any special value to the goal which Anna Freud so ardently strives after—that of bringing about in children an attitude towards analysis analogous to the attitude of adults. I think, too, that if Anna Freud does attain this goal by the means which she describes (and this can be only in a certain limited number of cases) the result is not that towards which her work is directed but something very different. The “acknowledgment of illness or of naughtiness” which she has succeeded in awaking in the child emanates from the anxiety which she has mobilised in him for her own purposes: castration-anxiety and the sense of guilt. (I will not here go into the question how far in adults too the reasonable and conscious desire to get well is simply a façade screening this anxiety.) With children we cannot expect to find any lasting basis for our analytic work in a conscious purpose which, as we know, even in adults, would not long hold firm as the sole support for the analysis.
Anna Freud too, it is true, thinks that this purpose is necessary in the first instance as a preparation for the work, but she further believes that, when once the purpose is there, she can rely upon it as the analysis progresses. I think this idea is mistaken and that whenever she appeals to this insight she is really having recourse to the child’s anxiety and sense of guilt. In itself there would be nothing objectionable about this, for feelings of anxiety and guilt are undoubtedly most important factors in the possibility of our work. Only I think it necessary for us to be clear what are the supports upon which we are relying and how we are using them. Analysis is not in itself a gentle method: it cannot spare the patient any suffering, and this applies equally to children. In fact, it must force the suffering into consciousness and bring about abreaction if the patients are to be spared permanent and more fatal suffering later. So my criticism is not that Anna Freud activates anxiety and the sense of guilt, but on the contrary that she does not resolve them sufficiently. It seems to me an unnecessary harshness towards a child when, as for instance she describes on p. 9, she brings into his consciousness the anxiety lest he should go mad, without immediately attacking this anxiety at its unconscious roots and thus as far as possible allaying it again.
But if it is really to feelings of anxiety and guilt that we have to appeal in our work, why should we not regard these two as factors to be reckoned with and work with them systematically from the outset?
I myself always do this, and I have found that I can place complete reliance in a technique which goes on the principle of taking into account and working analytically with the quantities of anxiety and of feelings of guilt which are so strong in all children and are much clearer and more easily laid hold of than in adults.
Anna Freud states (p. 56) that a hostile or anxious attitude towards me in a child does not justify me in concluding immediately that there is a negative transference at work, for “the more tenderly a little child is attached to his own mother, the fewer friendly impulses are left in him for strangers”. I do not think we can draw a comparison, as she does, with tiny infants who reject what is strange to them. We do not know a great deal about tiny infants, but it is possible to learn a great deal from an early analysis about the mind of a child of, say, three years old, and there we see that it is only very ambivalent neurotic children who manifest fear or hostility towards strangers. My experience has confirmed my belief that if I construe this dislike at once as anxiety and negative transference feeling, and interpret it as such in connection with material which the child at the same time produces and then trace it back to its original object, the mother, I can at once observe that the anxiety diminishes. This manifests itself in the beginning of a more positive transference and, with it, of more vigorous play. In older children the situation is analogous though it differs in detail. Of course, my method presupposes that I have from the beginning been willing to attract to myself the negative as well as the positive transference and, further, to investigate it to its source in the Oedipus situation. Both these measures are in full agreement with analytical principles, but Anna Freud rejects them for reasons which I think are unfounded.
I believe then that a radical difference between our attitudes to anxiety and a sense of guilt in children is this: that Anna Freud makes use of these feelings to attach the child to herself, while I from the outset enlist them in the service of the analytic work. There cannot in any case be any very large number of children in whom one can stir up anxiety without its proving an element which will most painfully disturb or even make impossible the progress of the work, unless one immediately proceeds to resolve it analytically.
Anna Freud, moreover, as far as I can understand from her book, employs this means only in particular cases. In other she tries by every means to bring about a positive transference, in order to fulfil the condition, which she regards as necessary for her work, of attaching the child to her own personality.
This method, again, seems to me unsound, for surely we could work more certainly and more effectually by purely analytic means. It is not every child who responds to us from the beginning with fear and dislike. My experience bears me out when I say that if a child’s attitude to us is friendly and playful we are justified in assuming that there is a positive transference and in at once making use of this in our work. And we have another excellent and well-tried weapon which we use in an analogous fashion to that in which we employ it in the analyses of adults, though there, it is true, we do not have so speedy and so plain an opportunity to intervene. I mean that we interpret this positive transference, that is, in both children’s as in adults’ analyses we trace it back to the original object. In general, we shall probably notice both the positive and the negative transference and we shall be given every opportunity for analytic work if we handle both from the outset analytically. By resolving some part of the negative transference we shall then obtain, just as with adults, an increase in the positive transference and this, in accordance with the ambivalence of childhood, will soon in its turn be succeeded by a re-emerging of the negative. Now this is true analytic work and an analytic situation has been established. Moreover, we have then found the basis upon which to build in the child itself, and we can often be to a great extent independent of a knowledge of its surroundings. In short, we have achieved the conditions necessary for analysis and not only are we spared the laborious, difficult and unreliable measures described by Anna Freud, but (and this seems even more important) we can ensure for our work the full value and success of an analyses in every sense equivalent to adult analysis.
At this point, however, I encounter an objection raised by Anna Freud in the second chapter of her book, entitled “The means employed in child-analysis”. To work in the way I have described we must get material from the child’s associations. Anna Freud and I and probably everyone who analyses children agree that they neither can nor will give associations in the same way as grown-ups and so sufficient material cannot be collected by means of speech alone. Amongst the means which Anna Freud suggests as useful for making up for the lack of verbal associations are some which I too have found valuable in my experience. If we examine these means rather more closely—take, for instance, drawing, or telling daydreams, etc.—we shall see that their object is to collect material in some other way than that of association according to rule, and that it is above all important with children to set their phantasy free and to induce them to phantasy. In one of Anna Freud’s statements we have a clue, which must be carefully considered, as to how this is to be done. She states that “there is nothing easier than to make children understand dream-interpretation”. And again (p. 31) “even children of poor intelligence, who seemed in every other respect as unfit as possible for analysis, succeeded in dream-interpretation”. I think that these children would perhaps not have been so unsuitable for analysis at all if Anna Freud had made more use, in other ways as well as in dream-interpretation, of the understanding of symbolism which they so plainly manifested. For it is my experience that, if this is done, no child, not even the least intelligent, is unfit for analysis.
For this is just the lever which we must make use of in child-analysis. A child will bring us an abundance of phantasies if we follow him along this path with the conviction that what he recounts is symbolic. In Chapter Three Anna Freud puts forward a number of theoretical arguments against the play-technique which I have devised, at least when it is applied for the purpose of analysis and not merely of observation. She thinks it doubtful whether one is justified in interpreting the content of the drama enacted in children’s play as symbolic and thinks that they might very likely be occasioned simply by actual observations or experiences of daily life. Here I must say that from Anna Freud’s illustrations of my technique, I can see that she misunderstands it. “If a child upsets a lamp-post or one of the figures in the game, she [Melanie Klein] interprets the action probably as due to aggressive tendencies towards the father, while, if the child makes two carts collide, it is construed as implying observation of parental coitus”. I should never attempt any such “wild” symbolic interpretations of children’s play. On the contrary I emphasized this very specially in my last paper.5 Supposing that a child gives expression to the same psychic material in various repetitions—often actually through various media, i.e. toys, water, by cutting-out, drawing, etc.—and supposing that, besides, I can observe that these particular activities are mostly accompanied at the time by a sense of guilt, manifesting itself either as anxiety or in representations which imply over-compensation, which are the expression of reaction-formations—supposing, then, that I have arrived at an insight into certain connections: then I interpret these phenomena and link them up with the Ucs and the analytic situation. The practical and theoretical conditions for the interpretation are precisely the same as in the analysis of adults.
The little toys I use are only one means I provide; paper, pencils, scissors, string, balls, bricks and, above all, water are others. They are at the child’s disposal to use if he likes and the purpose of them all is simply to gain access to and to liberate his phantasy. There are some children who for a long time will not touch a toy or perhaps for weeks on end will only cut things out. In the case of children altogether inhibited in play the toys may possibly simply be a means of studying more closely the reasons for their inhibition. Some children, often the very little ones, as soon as the playthings have given them the opportunity of dramatizing some of the phantasies or experiences by which they are dominated, often put the toys aside altogether and pass on to every imaginable kind of game in which they themselves, various objects in my room and I have to take part.
I have gone into this detail of my technique at some length because I want to make clear the principle which, in my experience, makes it possible to handle children’s associations in the greatest abundance and to penetrate into the deepest Ucs strata.
We can establish a quicker and surer contact with the Ucs of children if, acting on the conviction that they are much more deeply under the sway of the Ucs and their instinctual impulses than are adults, we shorten the route which adult analysis takes by way of contact with the ego and make direct connection with the child’s Ucs. It is obvious that, if this preponderance of the Ucs is a fact, we should also expect that the mode of representation by symbols which prevails in the Ucs would be much more natural to children than to adults, in fact, that the former will be dominated by it. Let us follow them along this path, that is to say, let us come into contact with their Ucs, making use of its language through our interpretation. If we do this we shall have won access to the children themselves. Of course this is not all so easily and quickly to be accomplished as it appears; if it were, the analysis of little children would take only a short time, and this is not by any means the case. In child-analysis, we shall again and again detect resistance no less markedly than in that of adults, in children very often in the form still the more natural to them, namely, in anxiety.
This, then, is the second factor which seems to me so essential if we wish to penetrate into the child’s Ucs. If we watch the alterations in his manner of representing what is going on within him (whether it is that he changes his game or gives it up or that there is a direct onset of anxiety) and try to see what there is in the nexus of the material to cause these alterations, we shall be convinced that we are always coming up against the sense of guilt and have to interpret this in its turn.
These two factors, which I have found to be the most reliable aids in the technique of child-analysis, are mutually dependent and complementary. Only by interpreting and so allaying the child’s anxiety whenever we can reach it shall we gain access to his Ucs and get him to phantasy. Then, if we follow out the symbolism that his phantasies contain, we shall soon see anxiety reappear, and thus we shall ensure the progress of the work.
The account given of my technique and the importance attributed by me to the symbolism contained in children’s actions might be misconstrued as implying that in child-analysis one has to do without the help of free association in the true sense.
In an earlier passage of my paper I pointed out that Anna Freud and I and all of us who work at child-analysis are agreed that children cannot and will not associate in the same way as adults. I should like here to add that probably it is chiefly that children cannot, not because they lack the capacity to put their thoughts into words (to some degree this would apply only to quite small children), but because anxiety resists verbal associations. It does not lie within the scope of this paper to discuss this interesting special question in greater detail: I will just briefly mention some facts of experience.
Representation by means of toys—indeed, symbolic representation in general, as being to some extent removed from the subject’s own person—is less invested with anxiety than is confession by word of mouth. If, then, we succeed in allaying anxiety and in getting in the first instance more indirect representations, we shall be able to convince ourselves that we can elicit for analysis the fullest verbal expression of which the child is capable. And then we find repeatedly that at times when anxiety becomes more marked the indirect representations once more occupy the foreground. Let me give a brief illustration. When I had advanced quite a long way in the analysis of a five-year-old boy, he produced a dream the interpretation of which went very deep and was fruitful in results. This interpretation occupied the whole analytic hour, all the associations being exclusively verbal. On the two following days he again brought dreams which turned out to be continuations of the first. But verbal associations to the second dream could be elicited only with great difficulty and one at a time. The resistance was plain and the anxiety markedly greater than on the day before. But the child turned to the box of toys and by means of dolls and other play-things depicted for me his associations, helping himself out with words again whenever he overcame some resistance. On the third day the anxiety was even greater, on account of the material which had come to light on the two previous days. The associations were given almost exclusively by means of play with toys and water.
If we are logical in our application of the two principles that I have emphasized, namely, that we should follow up the child’s symbolic mode of representation and that we should take into account the facility with which anxiety is roused in children, we shall be able also to count on their associations as a very important means in analysis, but, as I have said, only at times and as one means amongst several.
I think therefore that Anna Freud’s statement is incomplete when she says: “Every now and again, too, unintentional and involuntary associations come to our aid” (p. 41). Whether associations appear or not depends quite regularly on certain definite attitudes in the analysand and in no way on chance. In my opinion we can make use of this means to a far greater extent than seems likely. Over and over again it bridges the gulf to reality, and this is one reason why it is more closely associated with anxiety than is the unreal, indirect mode of representation. On this account I would not regard any child-analysis, not even that of a quite little child, as terminated unless I could finally succeed in its being expressed in speech, to the degree to which the child is capable of this, and so of linking it up with reality.
We have then a perfect analogy with the technique of adult analysis. The only difference is that with children we find that the Ucs prevails to a far greater extent and that therefore its mode of expression is far more predominant than in adults, and further that we have to take into account the child’s greater tendency to anxiety.
But this is also very decidedly true of analysis during the latency and prepubertal periods and even to some extent during puberty. In a number of analyses in which the subjects were at one or other of these phases of development I was forced to adopt a modified form of the same technique as I use with children.
I think that what I have now said robs of their force Anna Freud’s two main objections to my play-technique. She questioned (1) whether we were justified in assuming that the symbolic content of children’s play is its main motive, and (2) whether we could regard children’s play as equivalent to verbal association in adults. For, she argues, such play lacks the idea of purpose which the adult brings to his analysis and which “enables him when associating to exclude all conscious directing and influencing of his trains of thought”.
To this latter objection I should like to reply further that these intentions in adult patients (which in my experience are not so effective as Anna Freud supposes even with them) are quite superfluous for children, and by this I do not mean very little children.
It is clear from what I have said that children are so much dominated by their Ucs that it is really unnecessary for them deliberately to exclude conscious ideas.6 Anna Freud herself too has weighed this possibility in her mind (p. 49).
I have devoted so much space to the question of the technique to be employed with children because this seems to me fundamental in the whole problem of child-analysis. When Anna Freud rejects the play-technique her argument applies not only to the analysis of little children but also in my opinion to the basic principle of the analysis of older children, as I understand it. The play-technique provides us with a rich abundance of material and gives us access to the deepest strata of the mind. If we make use of it we arrive unconditionally at the analysis of the Oedipus complex, and once arrived, we cannot mark out limits for analysis in any direction. If then we really wish to avoid analysing the Oedipus complex we must not make use of the play-technique, even in its modified application to older children.
It follows that the question is not whether the analysis of children can go so deep as that of adults, but whether it ought to go so deep. To answer this question we must examine the reasons which Anna Freud gives, in Chapter Four of her book, against penetrating so far.
Before we do this, however, I should like to discuss Anna Freud’s conclusions, given in Chapter Three of her book, about the part played by the transference in child-analysis.
Anna Freud describes certain essential differences between the transference situation in adults and in children. She comes to the conclusion that in the latter there may be a satisfactory transference, but that no transference-neurosis is produced. In support of this statement she adduces the following theoretical argument. Children, she says, are not ready like adults to enter upon a new edition of their love-relations, because the original love-objects, the parents, still exist as objects in reality.
In order to refute this statement, which I believe to be incorrect, I should have to enter into a detailed discussion of the structure of the super-ego in children. But as this is contained in a later passage I will content myself here with a few statements which are supported by my subsequent exposition.
The analysis of very young children has shewn me that even a three-year-old child has left behind him the most important part of the development of his Oedipus complex. Consequently he is already far removed, through repression and feelings of guilt, from the objects whom he originally desired. His relations to them have undergone distortion and transformation so that the present love-objects are now imagos of the original objects.
Hence in reference to the analyst children can very well enter upon a new edition of their love-relations in all the fundamental and therefore decisive points. But here we encounter a second theoretical objection. Anna Freud considers that in analysing children the analyst is not, as he is when the patient is an adult, “impersonal, shadowy, a blank page upon which the patient can inscribe his phantasies”, one who avoids imposing prohibitions and permitting gratifications. But according to my experience it is exactly thus that a children’s analyst can and ought to behave, when once he has established the analytic situation. His activity is only apparent, for even when he throws himself wholly into all the play-phantasies of the child, conforming to the modes of representation peculiar to children, he is doing just the same as the analyst of adults, who, we know, also willingly follows the phantasies of his patients. But beyond this I do not permit child-patients any personal gratifications, either in the form of presents or caresses or personal encounters outside analysis and so forth. In short, I keep on the whole to the approved rules of adult analysis. What I give to the child-patient is analytic help and relief, which he feels comparatively quickly even if he has not had any sense of illness before. Besides this, in response to his trust in me he can absolutely rely on perfect sincerity and honesty on my part towards him.
I must, however, contest Anna Freud’s conclusion no less than her premises. In my experience a full transference-neurosis does occur in children, in a manner analogous to that in which it arises with adults. When analysing children I observe that their symptoms change, are accentuated or lessened in accordance with the analytic situation. I observe in them the abreaction of affects in close connection with the progress of the work and in relation to myself. I observe that anxiety arises and that the children’s reactions work themselves out on this analytic ground. Parents who watch their children carefully have often told me that they have been surprised to see habits, etc., which had long disappeared come back again. I have not found that children work off their reactions when they are at home as well as when with me: for the most part they are reserved for abreaction in the analytic hour. Of course it does happen that at times, when very powerful affects are violently emerging, something of the disturbance becomes noticeable to those with whom the children are associated, but this is only temporary and it cannot be avoided in the analysis of adults either.
On this point, therefore, my experience is in complete contradiction to Anna Freud’s observations. The reason for this difference in our findings is easy to see: it depends on the different way in which she and I handle the transference. Let me sum up what I have already said. Anna Freud thinks that a positive transference is a necessary condition for all analytic work with children. She regards a negative transference as undesirable.
In the case of children [she writes], it is especially inconvenient to have negative tendencies directed against the analyst, in spite of the light they may throw on many points. We shall endeavour to demolish or modify them as soon as possible. The really fruitful work will always be done when the attachment to the analyst is positive.
[p. 51]
We know that one of the principal factors in analytic work is the handling of the transference, strictly and objectively, in accordance with the facts, in the manner which our analytic knowledge has taught us to be the right one. A thorough resolution of the transference is regarded as one of the signs that an analysis has been satisfactorily concluded. On this basis psycho-analysis has laid down a number of important rules which prove necessary in every case. Anna Freud sets aside these rules for the most part in child-analysis. With her the transference, the clear recognition of which we know to be an important condition of our work, becomes an uncertain and doubtful concept. She says that the analyst “probably has to share with the parents the child’s love or hate” (p. 56). And I do not understand what is intended by “demolishing or modifying” the inconvenient negative tendencies.
Here premises and conclusions move in a circle. If the analytic situation is not produced by analytic means, if the positive and the negative transference are not handled logically, then neither shall we bring about a transference-neurosis nor can we expect the child’s reactions to work themselves out in relation to analysis and the analyst. Later in this paper I will deal with this point more thoroughly, but at present I will just briefly sum up what I have already said by stating that Anna Freud’s method of attracting the positive transference by all possible means to herself and of lessening the negative transference when it is directed against herself seems to me not only technically incorrect but, in effect, to militate far more against the parents than my method. For it is only natural that the negative transference will then remain directed against those with whom the child is associated in daily life.
In her fourth chapter Anna Freud comes to a number of conclusions which seem to me again to display this vicious circle, this time specially clearly. The term “vicious circle” I have explained elsewhere as meaning that from certain premises conclusions are drawn which are then used to confirm those same premises. As one of the conclusions which seem to me erroneous I would instance Anna Freud’s statement that in child-analysis it is impossible to surmount the barrier of the child’s imperfect mastery of speech. It is true she makes a reservation: “As far as my experience goes up till now, with the technique I have described”. But the very next sentence contains an explanation of a general theoretical nature. She says that what we discover about early childhood when we are analysing adults “is revealed by these very methods of free association and interpretation of the transference-reactions, i.e. by those means which fail us in child-analysis”. In various passages in her book Anna Freud stresses the idea that child-analysis, adapting itself to the child’s mind, must alter its methods. Yet she bases her doubts of the technique which I have evolved on a number of theoretical considerations, without having submitted it to a practical test. But I have proved by practical application that this technique helps us to get the child’s associations in even greater abundance than we get in adult analysis and thus to penetrate far deeper than we can in the latter.
From what my own experience has taught me, then, I really can only emphatically combat Anna Freud’s statement that both the methods used in adult analysis (namely, free association and the interpretation of the transference-reactions), in order to investigate the patient’s early childhood, fail us in analysing children. I am even convinced that it is the special province of child-analysis, particularly that of quite young children, to make valuable contributions to our theory, just because with children analysis can go far deeper and therefore can bring to light details which do not appear so clearly in the case of adults.
Anna Freud compares the situation of an analyst of children with that of an ethnologist “who should try by contact with a primitive people to acquire information about prehistoric times more easily than by studying the civilized races” (p. 66). This again strikes me as a theoretical statement which contradicts practical experience. The analysis of little children, as well as that of older children if it is carried far enough, gives a very clear picture of the enormous complexity of development which we find even in very little ones and shews that children of the age of, say, three years, just because they are already so much the products of civilization, have gone and are going through severe conflicts. To keep to Anna Freud’s illustration, I should say that precisely from the standpoint of research a children’s analyst finds himself in a fortunate situation which is never vouchsafed to an ethnologist, namely that of finding the civilized people in closest association with the primitive and, in consequence of this rare association, of receiving the most valuable information about both the earliest and later times.
I will now deal in greater detail with Anna Freud’s conceptions of the child’s super-ego. In Chapter Four of her book are certain statements which have special significance, both because of the importance of the theoretical question to which they relate and also because of the wide conclusions which Anna Freud draws from them.
The deep analysis of children, and particularly of little children, has led me to form quite a different picture of the super-ego in early childhood from that painted by Anna Freud principally as a result of theoretical considerations. It is certain that the ego of children is not comparable to that of adults. The super-ego, on the other hand, approximates closely to that of the adult and is not radically influenced by later development as is the ego. The dependence of children on external objects is naturally greater than that of adults and this fact produces results which are indisputable, but which I think Anna Freud very much over-estimates, and therefore does not rightly interpret. For these external objects are certainly not identical with the already developed super-ego of the child, even though they have at one time contributed to its development. It is only thus that we can explain the astonishing fact that in children of three, four or five years old we encounter a super-ego of a severity which is often in the sharpest contradiction to the real love-objects, the parents. I should like to instance the case of a four-year-old boy whose parents have not only never punished or threatened him but who are really unusually kind and loving. The conflict between the ego and the super-ego in this case (and I am taking it only as one example of many) shews that the super-ego is of a phantastic severity. On account of the well-known formula which prevails in the Ucs this child anticipates, by reason of his own cannibalistic and sadistic impulses, such punishments as castration, being cut to pieces, eaten up, etc., and lives in perpetual dread of them. The contrast between his tender and loving mother and the punishment threatened by the child’s super-ego is actually grotesque and is an illustration of the fact that we must on no account identify the real objects with those which children introject.
We know that the formation of the super-ego takes place on the basis of various identifications. My results shew that this process, which terminates with the passing of the Oedipus complex, i.e. with the beginning of the latency period, commences at a very early age. In my last paper I have indicated, basing my remarks on my findings in the analysis of very young children, that the Oedipus complex ensues upon the deprivation experienced at weaning, that is, at the end of the first or the beginning of the second year of life. But, hand in hand with this, we see the beginnings of the formation of the super-ego. The analyses both of older and of quite young children give a clear picture of the various elements out of which the super-ego develops and the different strata in which the development takes place. We see how many stages there are in this evolution before it terminates with the beginning of the latency period. It is really a case of terminating, for, in contrast to Anna Freud, I am led to believe from the analysis of children that their super-ego is a highly resistant product, at heart unalterable, and is not essentially different from that of adults. The difference is only that the maturer ego of adults is better able to come to terms with their super-ego. This, however, is often only apparently the case. Further, adults can defend themselves better against those authorities which represent the super-ego in the outside world; children are inevitably more dependent on these. But this does not imply, as Anna Freud concludes, that the child’s super-ego is still “too immature, too dependent on its object, spontaneously to control the demands of the instincts, when analysis has got rid of the neurosis”. Even in children these objects—the parents—are not identical with the super-ego. Their influence on the child’s superego is entirely analogous to that which we can prove to be at work on adults when life places them in somewhat similar situations, e.g. in a position of peculiar dependence. The influence of dreaded authorities in examinations, of officers in military service, and so forth, is quite comparable to the effect which Anna Freud perceives in the “constant correlations in children between the super-ego and the love-objects, which may be likened to those of two vessels with a communicating duct”. Under the pressure of those situations in life such as I have mentioned, or others similar to them, adults, like children, react with an increase in their difficulties. This is because the old conflicts are reactivated or reinforced through the harshness of reality, and here a predominant part is played precisely by the intensified operation of the super-ego. Now this is exactly the same process as that to which Anna Freud refers, namely, the influencing of the (child’s) super-ego by objects still actually present. It is true that good and bad influences on character and all the other dependent relations of childhood exert a stronger pressure on children than is undergone by adults. Yet in adults too such things are undoubtedly important.7
Anna Freud quotes an example (pp. 70–71) which she thinks illustrates particularly well the weakness and dependence of the claims of the ego-ideal in children. A boy in the period of life immediately preceding puberty, when he had an uncontrollable impulse to steal, found that the highest agency which influenced him was his fear of his father. She regards this as a proof that here the father who actually existed could still be substituted for the super-ego.
Now I think that quite often we can find in adults similar developments of the super-ego. There are many people who (often all through their lives) ultimately control their asocial instincts only through fear of a “father” in a somewhat different guise: the police, the law, loss of caste, etc. The same is true too of the “double morality” which Anna Freud observes in children. It is not only children who keep one moral code for the world of adults and another for themselves and their boon companions. Many grown-ups behave in just the same way and adopt one attitude when they are alone or with their equals, and another towards superiors and strangers.
I think that one reason for the difference of opinion between Anna Freud and myself on this very important point is the following. By the super-ego I understand (and here I am in complete agreement with what Freud has taught us of its development) the faculty which has resulted from the Oedipus development through the introjection of the Oedipus objects, and, with the passing of the Oedipus complex, has assumed a lasting and unalterable form. As I have already explained, this faculty, both during its evolution and still more when it is completely formed, differs fundamentally from those objects which really initiated its development. Of course children (but also adults) will set up all kinds of ego-ideals, installing various “super-egos”, but this surely takes place in the more superficial strata and is at bottom determined by that one super-ego which is firmly rooted in the child and whose nature is immutable. The super-ego which Anna Freud thinks is still operative in the persons of the parents is not identical with this inner super-ego in the true sense, though I do not dispute its influence in itself. If we wish to reach the real super-ego, to reduce its power of operation and to influence it, our only means of doing so is analysis. But by this I mean an analysis which investigates the whole development of the Oedipus complex and the structure of the super-ego.
To return to Anna Freud’s illustration which I mentioned before. In the boy whose highest weapon against the onslaught of his instincts was his fear of his father we encounter a super-ego which was certainly immature. I would rather not call such a super-ego typically “childish”. To take another example: The four-year-old boy of whom I reported that he suffered from the pressure of a castrating and cannibalistic super-ego, in complete contrast to his kind and loving parents, has certainly not only this one super-ego. I discovered in him identifications which corresponded more closely to his real parents, though not by any means identical with them. These figures, who appeared good and helpful and ready to forgive, he called his “fairy papa and mamma”, and, when his attitude towards me was positive, he allowed me in the analysis to play the part of the “fairy mamma” to whom everything could be confessed. At other times—always when the negative transference was reappearing—I played the part of the wicked mamma from whom everything evil that he phantasied was anticipated. When I was the fairy mamma he was able to make the most extraordinary demands and gratify wishes which could have no possible fulfilment in reality. I was to help him by bringing him as a present, in the night, an object which represented his father’s penis, and this was then to be cut up and eaten. That he and she should kill his father together was one of the wishes which the “fairy mamma” was to gratify. When I was the “fairy papa”, we were to do the same sort of things to his mother, and, when he took over the role himself and I enacted that of the son, he not only gave me leave to have coitus with his mother but gave me information about it, encouraged me and also shewed me how the phantasied coitus could be performed with the mother by father and son simultaneously. A whole series of most varied identifications, which were in opposition to one another, originated in widely different strata and periods and differed fundamentally from the real objects, had in this child resulted as a whole in a super-ego which actually gave the impression of being normal and well developed. An additional reason for selecting this case from many analogous ones is that it was that of a child who would be called perfectly normal and who was having analytic treatment only for prophylactic reasons. It was only after we had done analysis for some time and the development of his Oedipus complex had been probed to the depths that I was able to recognize the complete structure and the different parts of this child’s super-ego. He shewed the reactions of a sense of guilt on a really high level ethically. He condemned anything that he regarded as wrong or ugly in a manner which, while appropriate to the ego of a child, was analogous to the functioning of the superego of an adult on a high ethical level.
The development of the child’s super-ego, but not less that of the adult, depends on various factors which need not here be discussed in greater detail. If for any reason this development has not been fully accomplished and the identifications are not wholly successful, then anxiety, in which the whole formation of the superego originated, will preponderate in its functioning.
The case which Anna Freud quotes does not seem to me to prove anything but that such developments of the super-ego exist. I do not think it shews that this is an instance of a specifically childish development, for we meet with the same phenomenon in those adults in whom the super-ego is undeveloped. And so I think that the conclusions which she draws from this case are erroneous.
What Anna Freud says in this connection gives me the impression that she believes the development of the super-ego, with reaction-formations and screen-memories, to take place to a large extent during the period of latency. My analytic knowledge of little children forces me to differ from her quite definitely on this point. My observations have taught me that all these mechanisms are set going when the Oedipus complex arises and are activated by that complex. With its passing they have accomplished their fundamental work; the subsequent developments and reactions are rather the super-structure on a substratum which has assumed a fixed form and persists unchanged. At certain times and in certain circumstances the reaction-formations are accentuated, and, again, when the pressure from without is more powerful, the super-ego will operate more powerfully.
These, however, are phenomena which are not peculiar to childhood.
That which Anna Freud regards as a further extension of the super-ego and reaction-formations in the periods of latency and immediately before puberty is simply an apparent outward adaptation to the pressure and requirements of the outside world, and has nothing to do with the true development of the super-ego. As they grow older, children (like adults) learn how to handle the “double moral code” more skilfully than little children who are as yet less conventional and more honest about things.
Let us now pass on to the deductions which the author makes from her statements about the dependent nature of the super-ego of children and their double moral code in relation to the emotions of shame and disgust.
On pp. 73–75 of her book Anna Freud argues that children differ from adults in this respect: that when the child’s instinctual tendencies have been brought into consciousness the super-ego by itself should not be expected to assume complete responsibility for their direction. For she believes that children, left to themselves on this point, can only discover “a single short and convenient path, namely, that which leads to direct gratification”. Anna Freud is reluctant—and gives good reasons for her reluctance—that the decision as to the way in which the instinctual forces liberated from repression are to be employed should be left to the persons responsible for the child’s training. She therefore considers that the only thing to be done is that “the analyst should guide the child in this most important point”. She gives an example to illustrate the necessity for educational intervention on the part of the analyst. Let us see what she says. If my objections to her theoretical propositions are valid they must stand the test of a practical example.
The case in question is one which she discusses in several passages of her book: that of a six-year-old girl who suffered from an obsessional neurosis. This child, who before treatment displayed inhibitions and obsessional symptoms, became for the time being naughty and lacking in restraint. Anna Freud drew the inference that at this point she ought to have intervened in the role of educator. She thought she recognized that the fact that the child gratified its anal impulses outside analysis, when once they were free from repression, indicated that she herself had made a mistake and had relied too much on the strength of the childish ego-ideal. She felt that this as yet insufficiently established super-ego had needed temporary educative influence on the part of the analyst and therefore was not at that point capable of controlling the child’s impulses unaided.
I think it will be a good thing if I too select an illustration in support of my view, which is contrary to Anna Freud’s. The case which I shall cite was a very severe one, that of a six-year-old girl who, at the beginning of the analysis, was suffering from an obsessional neurosis.8
Erna, whose behaviour at home was unbearable and who displayed marked asocial tendencies in all her relations, suffered from great sleeplessness, excessive obsessional onanism, complete inhibition in learning, moods of deep depression, obsessive brooding, and a number of other serious symptoms. She was treated analytically for two years, and that the result was a cure is evident from the fact that for more than a year now she has been at a school which on principle takes only “normal children” and that she is standing the test of the life there. As goes without saying, in such a severe case of obsessional neurosis the child suffered from excessive inhibitions and deep remorse. She displayed the characteristic cleavage of personality into “devil and angel”, “good and wicked princess”, etc. In her, too, analysis naturally liberated enormous quantities of affect as well as anal-sadistic impulses. During the analytic hours extraordinary abreactions took place: rages which were vented on objects in my room, such as cushions, etc.; dirtying and destroying of playthings, smearing paper with water, plasticine, pencils, and so forth. In all this the child gave the impression of a very considerable freedom from inhibition and seemed to take a remarkable pleasure in this often quite wild behaviour. But I discovered that it was not simply a case of “uninhibited” gratification of her anal fixations, but that other factors were playing a decisive part. She was not by any means so “happy” as might have been thought at first sight and as those with whom the child was associated assumed to be the case in the instance quoted by Anna Freud. To a great extent what lay behind Erna’s “lack of restraint” was anxiety and also the need for punishment which compelled her to repeat her behaviour. In it, too, there was clear evidence of all the hate and defiance which dated from the period when she was being trained in cleanliness. The situation changed completely when we had analysed these early fixations, their connection with the development of the Oedipus complex, and the sense of guilt associated with it.
In these periods when anal-sadistic impulses were being liberated in such force Erna shewed a passing inclination to abreact and gratify these outside analysis. I came to the same conclusion as Anna Freud: that the analyst must have made a mistake. Only—and here is probably one of the most salient and fundamental differences in our views—I concluded that I had failed somehow on the analytic side, and not on the educational. I mean that I realized that I had failed to resolve the resistances completely in the analytic hour and to release in its fullness the negative transference. I have found in this and in every other case that if we want to make it possible for children to control their impulses better without fretting themselves in a laborious struggle with them, the Oedipus development must be laid bare analytically as completely as possible, and the feelings of hate and guilt which result from it must be investigated down to their earliest beginnings.9
Now if we look to see at what point Anna Freud found it necessary to substitute educational for analytic measures we find that the little patient herself gives us quite exact information about it. After Anna Freud had clearly demonstrated to her (p. 41) that people could only behave so badly to some one they hated, the child asked “why she should have any such feeling of hate towards her mother, whom she supposed she loved very much”. This question was well justified and shews that good understanding of the essence of analysis that we often find in even quite little patients of a certain obsessional type. The question points the way which the analysis ought to have taken; it should have penetrated deeper. Anna Freud, however, did not take this way, for we read: “Here I refused to tell her any more, for I too had come to the end of what I knew”. The little patient then tried herself to help to find the way which should lead them further. She repeated a dream which she had already mentioned the meaning of which was a reproach against her mother for always going away just when the child needed her most. Some days later she produced another dream which clearly indicated jealousy of her younger brothers and sisters.
Anna Freud, then, stopped and ceased to press the analysis any further just at the point where she would have had to analyse the child’s hatred against her mother, that is, where it really meant first clearing up the whole Oedipus situation. We see that it is true that she had liberated and brought to abreaction some of the anal-sadistic impulses, but she did not follow up the connection of these impulses with the Oedipus development; on the contrary she confined her investigations to superficial conscious or preconscious strata, for, as far as one can judge from what she writes, she seems also to have omitted to follow up the child’s jealousy of her brothers and sisters to her unconscious death-wishes against them. Had Anna Freud done so this would again have led on to the death-wishes against the mother. Moreover, up till then she must also have avoided analysing the attitude of rivalry with the mother, for otherwise both patient and analyst must by this time have known something of the causes of the child’s hatred of her mother.
In the fourth chapter of her book, where Anna Freud quotes this analysis as an illustration of the necessity for the analyst to intervene for a time in the educational role, she is apparently considering that turning-point in the analysis which I have just discussed. But I picture the situation as follows: the child became partially conscious of her anal-sadistic tendencies but was not given the opportunity through a further analysis of her Oedipus situation to become largely and fundamentally free of them. In my view it was not a question of directing her to a painful mastery and control of the impulses liberated from repression. What was needed was rather to subject to a further and fuller analysis the motive-force behind these impulses.
But I have the same criticism to make of certain other illustrations given by Anna Freud. She refers several times to confessions of onanism which she received from patients. The nine-year-old girl who made such admissions in two dreams which she related (pp. 31–32) was, I think, telling much more than that and something very important. Her dread of fire and the dream of the explosion in the geyser, which took place on account of wrongdoing on her part and was visited with punishment, seem to me clearly to indicate observations of parental coitus. This is evident in the second dream as well. In it there were “two bricks of different colours and a house which they set on fire”. These, as my experience of child-analysis enables me to say quite generally, regularly represent the primal scene. That this was true in the case of this little girl, with her dreams of fire, is to my mind plain from her drawings of the monsters (described by Anna Freud, pp. 37, 38) which she called “biters” and of the witch pulling out a giant’s hair. Anna Freud is certainly right in interpreting these drawings as indicating the child’s castration-anxiety, as well as her masturbation. But I have no doubt that the witch, who castrates the giant, and the “biter” represent parental coitus, construed by the child as a sadistic acid of castration, and further that, when she received this impression, she herself conceived sadistic desires against her parents (the explosion of the geyser caused by her in the dream), that her masturbation was associated with these and that therefore, from its connection with the Oedipus complex, it involved a deep sense of guilt and, on that account, involved the compulsion to repetition and part of the fixation.
What then was left out in Anna Freud’s interpretation? Everything which would have led deeper into the Oedipus situation. But this means that she omitted to explain the deeper causes of the sense of guilt and of the fixation, and made it impossible to reduce the latter. I am compelled to draw the same conclusion as in the case of the little obsessional neurotic: If Anna Freud had submitted the instinctual impulses to a more thorough analysis, there would have been no necessity to teach the child how to control them. And at the same time the cure would have been more complete. For we know that the Oedipus complex is the nuclear complex in neurosis; hence analysis, if it shrinks from analysing that complex, cannot resolve the neurosis either.
Now what are Anna Freud’s reasons for refraining from thorough analysis, which should without reservation investigate the child’s relation to his parents and to the Oedipus complex? There are a number of important arguments which we come upon in different passages of the book. Let us summarize them and consider what they amount to.
Anna Freud has the feeling that she ought not to intervene between child and parents and that the home training would be endangered and conflicts aroused in the child if his opposition to his parents were brought into consciousness.
Now I think that this is the point which chiefly determines the difference between Anna Freud’s and my views and our opposite methods of work. She herself says (p. 14) that she has a bad conscience in relation to the child’s parents as her employers if she, as she calls it, “turns against them”. In the case of a nurse who was hostile to her (pp. 20–21) she did everything she could to prejudice the child against the woman and to detach the positive feeling from her and attach it to herself. She hesitates to do this where the parents are in question, and I think she is entirely right. The difference in our point of view is this: that I never attempt in any way to prejudice a child against those with whom he is associated. But if his parents have entrusted him to me to analyse, either in order to cure a neurosis or for other reasons, I think I am justified in taking the line which seems to me in the child’s interest the most advantageous and the only possible one. I mean that of analysing without reservation his relation to those about him, and therefore in particular to his parents and brothers and sisters.
There are several dangers which Anna Freud apprehends from analysis of the relation to the parents and which she thinks would arise from that weakness assumed by her to characterize the child’s super-ego. Let me mention some of them.—When the transference is successfully resolved, the child could no longer find his way back to the proper love-objects, and he might be forced either “to fall back into neurosis or, if this way were closed to him on account of the success of the analytic treatment, to take the opposite direction: that of open rebellion” (pp. 61, 62. Or again: if the parents use their influence in opposition to the analyst, the result would be, “since the child is emotionally attached to both parties, a situation similar to that which arises in an unhappy marriage where the child has become a bone of contention” (p. 77). And again: “Where the child’s analysis cannot become an organic part of his whole life but intrudes itself like a foreign body into his other relations and disturbs them we shall probably only involve him in more conflicts than our treatment solves” (p. 84).
In so far as it is the idea that the child’s super-ego is as yet not strong enough which makes the author fear that, when he is freed from neurosis, he will no longer adapt himself satisfactorily to the necessary demands of education and of the persons with whom he is associated, I would reply as follows:
My experience has taught me that, if we analyse a child without any preconceptions whatever in our minds, we shall form a different picture of him, just because we are able to penetrate further into that critical period before the age of two years. There is then revealed in a far greater degree the severity of the child’s super-ego, a feature Anna Freud herself has on occasion discovered. We find that what is needed is not to reinforce this super-ego but to tone it down. Let us not forget that educational influences and cultural demands are not suspended during analysis, even if the analyst, who acts as a quite unbiassed third person, does not assume responsibility for them. If the super-ego has been strong enough to lead to conflict and to neurosis, it will surely retain sufficient influence, even if in the analysis we modify it by little and little.
I have never finished an analysis with the feeling that this faculty had become too much weakened; on the other hand there have been a good many at the conclusion of which I have wished that its exaggerated power could be still further reduced.
Anna Freud justly emphasizes the fact that, if we secure a positive transference, children will contribute much in the way of co-operation and in other kinds of sacrifice. But I think this surely proves that, besides the strictness of the super-ego, this craving for love is an adequate security that the child will have a strong enough motive to comply with reasonable cultural requirements, if only his capacity for love be liberated by analysis.
We must not forget that the demands made by reality on the adult ego are far heavier than the much less exacting demands with which the much weaker ego of the child is confronted.
Of course it is possible that, if the child has to associate with people lacking in insight, neurotic, or otherwise harmful to him, the result may be that we cannot completely clear up his own neurosis or that it may be evoked again by his surroundings. According to my experience, however, we can even in these cases do much to mitigate matters and to induce a better development. Moreover, the neurosis on its reappearance will be milder and easier to cure in the future. Anna Freud’s fears that a child who has been analysed and remains in surroundings wholly adverse to analysis will, on account of his detachment from his love-objects, become more opposed to them, and hence more of a prey to conflicts, seem to me theoretical considerations which are refuted by experience. Even in such cases I have found that the children were enabled by analysis to adapt themselves better and therefore better to stand the test of an unfavourable milieu and to suffer less than before being analysed.
And I have proved repeatedly that when a child becomes less neurotic it becomes less tiresome to those around it who are themselves neurotic or lacking in insight, and in this way too analysis will exercise only a favourable influence on their relationships.
In the last eight years I have analysed a large number of children; and my findings in regard to this point, which is crucial in the question of child-analysis, have been constantly confirmed. I would summarize them by saying that the danger apprehended by Anna Freud, that the analysis of a child’s negative feelings to its parents will spoil their relationship, is always and in all circumstances nonexistent. Rather, the exact opposite is the case. Exactly the same thing takes place as with adults: the analysis of the Oedipus situation not only releases the negative feelings of the child towards its parents and brothers and sisters but it also in part resolves them, and thus makes it possible for the positive impulses to be greatly strengthened. It is just the analysis of the earliest period which brings to light the hate-tendencies and feelings of guilt originating in the early oral deprivation, the training in cleanliness and the deprivation connected with the Oedipus situation. And it is this bringing of them to light which largely frees the child from them. The final result is a deeper and better relation to those around him, and by no means a detachment in the sense of an estrangement. The same applies to the age of puberty, only that at this period the capacity for detachment and transference necessary in that particular phase of development is powerfully reinforced by analysis. So far I have never had complaints from the family, after the analysis terminated or even while it was going on, that the child’s relation to those around him had become worse. Now this means a good deal when we remember the ambivalence of the relations. On the other hand I have frequently received assurances that children have become much more social and amenable to training. So in the end I do the parents as well as the child a great service in this very matter of improving the relation between them.
Undoubtedly it is desirable and helpful that the parents should support us in our work both during and after the analysis. I must, however, say that such gratifying instances are decidedly in the minority: they represent the ideal case, and upon this we cannot base, our method. Anna Freud says (p. 83): “It is not only definite illness which will decide us to analyse a child. The place of child-analysis is above all in the analytic milieu; for the present we must confine it to children whose parents are analysts, have themselves been analysed or have a certain confidence in and respect for analysis”. In reply I would say that we must discriminate very clearly between the Cs and the Ucs attitudes of the parents themselves, and I have repeatedly found that the Ucs attitude is by no means guaranteed by the conditions desiderated by Anna Freud. Parents may be theoretically entirely convinced of the necessity of analysis and may ostensibly wish to help us with all their might and yet for complexive reasons they may hinder us in our work all the way along. On the other hand I have constantly found that people who knew nothing about analysis—sometimes just a homely nurse who met me with personal confidence—have been most helpful owing to a favourable Ucs attitude. However, in my experience, anyone who analyses children has to reckon with a certain hostility and jealousy in nurses, governesses, and even mothers and has to try to accomplish the analysis in spite of and against these feelings. At first sight this seems impossible and it certainly is a special and very considerable difficulty in child-analysis. Nevertheless in most cases I have not found it insuperable. Of course I presuppose that we have not “to share with the parents in the child’s love and hate”, but that we handle both positive and negative transference in such a way as to enable us to establish the analytic situation and to rely upon it. It is amazing how children, even little children, then support us by their insight and their need for help and how we are able to include in our work the resistances caused by those with whom the little patients are associated.
My experience, therefore, has gradually led me to emancipate myself in my work as far as possible from these persons. Valuable as their communications at times may be, when they tell us about important changes which are taking place in the children and afford us insight into the real situation, we must of necessity be able to manage without this aid. I do not of course imply that an analysis may never come to grief through the fault of those associated with the child, but I can only say that so long as the parents send their children to be analysed at all I see no particular reason why it should be impossible to carry the analysis through simply because their attitude shews a lack of insight or is otherwise unfavourable.
From all that I have said it will be clear that my position with regard to the advisability of analysis in various cases is entirely different from Anna Freud’s in other respects as well. I consider analysis helpful not only in every case of obvious mental disturbance and faulty development, but also as a means of diminishing the difficulties of normal children. The way may be indirect, but I am sure that it is not too hard, too costly, or too tedious.
In this second part of my paper my intention was to prove that it is impossible to combine in the person of the analyst analytical and educational work, and I hoped to shew why this is so. Anna Freud herself describes these functions (p. 82) as “two difficult and contradictory tasks”. And again she says: “To analyse and to educate, i.e. at one and the same time to allow and to forbid, to loose and to bind again”. I may sum up my arguments by saying that the one activity in effect cancels the other. If the analyst, even only temporarily, becomes the representative of the educative agencies, if he assumes the role of the super-ego, at that point he blocks the way of the instinctual impulses to Cs: he becomes the representative of the repressing faculties. I will go a step further and say that, in my experience, what we have to do with children as well as with adults is not simply to establish and maintain the analytic situation by every analytic means and to refrain from all direct educative influence, but, more than that, a children’s analyst must have the same Ucs attitude as we require in the analyst of adults, if he is to be successful. It must enable him to be really willing only to analyse and not to wish to mould and direct the minds of his patients. If anxiety does not prevent him, he will be able calmly to wait for the development of the correct issue, and in this way that issue will be achieved.
If he does this, however, he will prove the validity of the second principle which I represent in opposition to Anna Freud: namely, that we must analyse completely and without reservation the child’s relation to his parents and his Oedipus complex.
1. Collected Papers, Vol. III, p. 284.
2. The italics are mine.
3. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. II, 1921.
4. Translated in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. IV, 1923.
5. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. VIII, 1927.
6. I must go yet a step further. I do not think that the problem is to induce a child in the analytic hour “to exclude all conscious directing and influencing of his trains of thought”, but rather that we must aim at inducing him to recognize all that lies outside his Ucs, not only in the analytic hour, but also in life in general. The special relation of children to reality rests (as I shewed in greater detail in my last paper already quoted: “The psychological principles of infant analysis”) on the fact that they endeavour to exclude and repudiate everything which is not in accordance with their Ucs impulses, and in this is included reality in the broader sense.
7. In Psycho-analytische Studien zur Charakterbildung (Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Leipsic, Vienna, Munich) Abraham says (ss. 57–58): “But the dependence of character-traits on the general fate of the libido is not confined to one particular period of life but is universally valid for the whole of life. The proverb ‘Jugend kennt keine Tugend’ [Youth knows no virtue] voices the fact that at a tender age character is immature and lacking in firmness. We should, however, not over-estimate the stability of character even in later years.”
8. I discussed this case-history in greater detail at the Würzburger Tagung Deutscher Analytiker (autumn 1924) and in one of my lectures in London in the summer of 1925. I propose later to publish the history. As the analysis went on I discovered that the severe obsessional neurosis masked a paranoia.
9. Anna Freud’s little patient recognized this too quite correctly when, after recounting how she had come off victorious in a fight with her devil, she defined the object of her analysis thus (p. 22): “You must help me not to be so unhappy if I have to be stronger than he is.” I think, however, that this object can be fully attained only when we have been able to clear up the earliest oral and anal-sadistic fixations and the feelings of guilt connected with them.
Anna Freud
Ladies and gentlemen,
Three papers on the subject of analysing children are being read before you at this Congress—instead of only one, which has hitherto been the order of the day—and this alone illustrates the importance that the subject has acquired in the eyes of the International Association during the last few years. I think that the reason for this accession of interest in child-analysis lies in the three-fold contribution it can make to our psycho-analytical knowledge. It gives us welcome confirmations of those conceptions of the mental life of children which, in the course of years, have been deduced by psycho-analytical theory from the analyses of adults. Secondly, as Mrs Klein’s paper has just demonstrated, the direct observation thus employed leads us to fresh conclusions and supplementary conceptions, and, finally, it serves as a point of transition to a field of applied analysis which, as many hold, will in the future be one of the most important. I refer to pedagogy.
Thus, strong in the sense of its threefold usefulness, child-analysis ventures to claim liberty and independence in various directions. It demands a new technique. This is willingly conceded: even the most conservative person realizes without difficulty that a difference in the object with which one is dealing demands different methods of approach. Thus Melanie Klein has evolved the play-technique for the analysis of little children, and, later, I myself put forward suggestions for the analysis of children in the latency period. But certain advocates of child-analysis (myself amongst them) go further still. They begin to ponder the question whether the processes in child-analysis are always wholly identical, from the theoretical standpoint, with those in the analysis of adults, and whether the aims and objects of the two forms of treatment are exactly the same. The people who follow this line of thought hold that those who analyse children should possess not only the correct analytical training and mental attitude but something further: something which is called for by the idiosyncrasies of childhood, namely, the training and the mental attitude of the pedagogue. I think we ought not to be dismayed by this word or to conclude offhand that to combine the two attitudes is somehow derogatory to analysis. It is worth while to take some concrete examples and see whether the demand for such a combination can at all be justified or whether the right thing is to reject it as illegitimate.
The first example I shall select for this purpose is a fragment from the analysis of an eleven-year-old boy. When he first came for treatment his disposition was of the feminine-masochistic type, his original object-relation with his mother being wholly overlaid by his identification of himself with her. His original masculine aggressive tendencies only occasionally found a vent in hostile behaviour to his brothers and sisters and isolated asocial acts; these were succeeded by violent outbreaks of remorse and by depression of spirits. I am now quoting from a period in his analysis in which his mind was occupied with countless thoughts, phantasies and dreams about death, or, more precisely, about killing.
Just at this time a very intimate friend of his mother’s was seriously ill, and his mother was informed by telegram of her friend’s danger. The patient seized upon this opportunity to weave phantasies in this connection. He phantasied that another telegram came saying: “She is dead”. His mother was much grieved. Then yet another telegram arrived saying that it was a mistake, the friend was alive again. His mother rejoiced. Then, in his phantasy, he caused telegrams to arrive in rapid succession—one saying that the friend was dead and the next that she had come to life again. The whole phantasy ended with the news that it was all a joke which had been played on his mother. It is not difficult to interpret the phantasy. We see clearly the boy’s ambivalence, his desire to kill the person whom his mother loved and his inability actually to carry his purpose through.
Soon after this he told me of the following obsessive act. When he was sitting in the w.c. he felt impelled to touch a knob on the wall on one side three times with his hand and immediately afterwards to do the same to a knob on the other side. At first this action seemed incomprehensible, but a few days later we found the explanation in a phantasy which he recounted in another connection. He imagined God as an old man sitting on a great throne in the courts of Heaven. To the right and left of Him were knobs or switches on the wall. If he pressed a knob on one side, some human being died: if he pressed one on the other side a child was born into the world. I think, if we compare the boy’s obsessive action with this daydream, it will be superfluous to interpret it further. The number three is probably explained by the number of the other children in the family.
Soon after this, a friend of the family, the father of one of his play-fellows and a man whom his mother knew very intimately, fell ill. On the way to his analysis the patient heard the telephone-bell ring, and, while with me, he made up the following phantasy: His mother had been sent for to the sick man’s house. She went in, entered the sick-room, went up to the bed and tried to speak to her friend, the patient. But he did not answer, and then she saw that he was dead. It was a great shock to her. At that moment the dead man’s little son came in. She called him and said: “Come and look, your father is dead”. The boy went up to the bed and spoke to his father, whereupon the father came to life and answered him. The child then turned to my patient’s mother and said: “What do you mean? He is alive”. The mother then spoke to the man again; once more he did not reply, for he was dead. But when the little boy came in again and spoke to him, the father came to life.
I have recounted this phantasy in such detail because it is so instructive and transparent, and contains in itself the interpretation of the two previously quoted. We see that the father is dead as far as his relation to the mother is concerned: as soon as it is a question of himself and his son, he is alive. In the earlier phantasies the ambivalent feelings to the same person—the desire to kill and the opposite desire to keep alive or to bring back to life—were simply separated into two different actions, cancelling one another. This last phantasy however, contains in addition a specification of the person threatened (on the one hand as husband and on the other a father), and here we have the historic explanation of the boy’s twofold attitude. Obviously the two tendencies originate in different phases of his development. The death-wish against the father as the rival for the mother’s love springs from the normal Oedipus phase with the positive object-love (since repressed) to the mother. Here his masculine aggressive impulses are directed against the father, who is to be killed to leave the way clear for the boy himself. But the other tendency—the desire to keep the father for himself—originates on the one hand in the early period, when the son’s attitude to the father was one of pure admiration and love, undisturbed by the rivalry connected with the Oedipus complex, and on the other (and this is the more important here) belongs to the phase of identification with the mother which has succeeded to the normal Oedipus attitude. Out of dread of the castration with which he is menaced by the father the boy has renounced his love for his mother and let himself be forced into the feminine position. Here he is forced to try to keep his father as the object of his homosexual love.
It is tempting to go on and describe the transition by which this boy passed from the desire to kill to a dread of death which awoke in him at night, and hence to gain access to the complicated structure of this neurosis of the latency period. But you know that that is not part of my purpose here. I have cited this fragment simply in order that you may confirm my impression that this part of the analysis of a child differs in no way from that of an adult. What we have to do is to free some of his masculine aggression and his object-love for his mother from repression and from being buried beneath his now feminine-masochistic character and his identification of himself with his mother. The conflict which we come upon here is an inner one. Even if originally dread of his real father in the outside world impelled him to make the repression, its success now depends on forces within himself. The father has been internalized, and the super-ego has become the representative of his power; the boy’s dread of him is experienced as dread of castration. Outbreaks of this castration-anxiety hinder every step which the analysis endeavours to make towards bringing the repressed Oedipus tendencies into consciousness. Only the slow analytical dissection of the super-ego, in historical sequence, makes it possible for my work of liberation to advance. Thus you see that, as far as this part of the task is concerned, the work and the attitude of the analyst are purely analytical. There is no place here for the introduction of educational methods.
Now let me give you an example where the opposite is the case. It is taken from the analysis of a little girl of six, part of which I have already published elsewhere for a different purpose. Here again (as always) it is a question of the impulses arising out of the Oedipus complex and once more the attitude towards killing comes in. The analysis shewed that the little girl had passed through an early phase of passionate love for her father and, in the usual way, had been disappointed by him through the birth of younger brothers and sisters. Her reaction to this disappointment was extraordinarily strong. Having barely attained to the genital phase, she abandoned it and regressed completely to the level of anal sadism. She turned her hostile impulses against the newly arrived younger children. She attempted to retain her father, from whom her love had almost entirely withdrawn itself, by incorporation if in no other way. But her efforts to feel herself a male came to grief in competition with an elder brother, for she realized that he was physically better equipped in this direction than she herself. The result was intense hostility to her mother: hate, first, because she had taken the father away from herself; secondly, because she had not made her herself a boy; and, finally, because the mother had borne the brothers and sisters whom she herself would have liked to bring into the world. But at this point—when my patient was about four years old—something of importance happened. She realized dimly that because of her hate—reaction she was on the way to losing the happy relation with her mother, whom she had loved dearly, in spite of all, from her earliest infancy. And in order not to lose this love for her mother and, still more, her mother’s love for her, without which she could not live, she made a tremendous effort to become “good”. Suddenly and, as it were, at a single blow she dissociated herself from all this hatred and with it from her whole sexual life, consisting of anal and sadistic behaviour and phantasies. She opposed it to her own personality as something alien, no longer part of herself, something which came from “the devil”. There was not much left: a tiny, cramped personality, whose emotional life was not wholly her own to control and whose very considerable intelligence and energy were devoted to keeping “the devil” in his state of forcible repression. In her relations with the outside world she was merely apathetic, while the lukewarm feelings of tenderness and affection for her mother were not strong enough to bear the slightest strain. And more than this: the dissociation which she had striven to accomplish could not be permanently maintained in spite of her great expenditure of effort. At times “the devil” would get the better of her for a short while and she fell into states in which without any adequate external cause she would throw herself on the ground and scream in a way which in the old days would certainly have been described as “possession”. Or she would suddenly surrender herself to the other side of her nature and luxuriate with the utmost enjoyment in sadistic phantasies, as, for example, that she roamed through her parents’ house from attic to cellar, breaking up all the furniture and every object she came across and throwing them out of the window, and without more ado cutting off the heads of all the people she met. Such occasions of being overmastered by the devil were invariably followed by anxiety and remorse. But there was another, still more dangerous way in which the dissociated evil tendencies used to break out. “The devil” loved fæces and dirt: she herself began gradually to develop a peculiar anxiety in regard to habits of cleanliness. “The devil” particularly enjoyed cutting off people’s heads, so at certain times she was compelled to creep to the beds of her brothers and sisters early in the morning and see that they were still all alive. “The devil” took a delight in energetically transgressing every human commandment, and so the child began to suffer from a dread of earthquakes, at night before she went to sleep, because someone had told her that an earthquake was the most terrific punishment which God was wont to inflict on human beings. Thus her daily life was in all sorts of ways made up of actions which either were substitutes for those of the dissociated evil nature or represented her remorse and endeavours to atone. So we may say that her magnificently conceived attempt to retain her mother’s love and to conform to social requirements and become “good” had failed miserably. The only result was an obsessional neurosis.
Now I did not enlist your interest in this infantile neurosis because of its fine structure and the fact that the symptoms were defined with a clearness unusual in so young a patient. My reason for describing it to you was a peculiar circumstance which struck me while I was treating the child.
In the case of the eleven-year-old boy which I described before you will remember that the motive factor in the repression was the dread of castration by the father. Naturally, the resistance which I observed in the analysis was this same castration-anxiety. But in the case of the little girl it was different. The repression, or rather the cleavage, in the childish personality was brought about under the stress of a dread of loss of love. According to our notions, the anxiety must have been very intense to be able so to disturb the child’s whole life. But in the analysis this very anxiety could hardly be detected as a serious resistance. Finding that my interest remained uniformly friendly, the little patient began to display to me her bad side quite calmly and frankly. You will reply that that is not very surprising. I know that we often meet with adult patients who anxiously and with an uneasy conscience keep their symptoms a secret from the whole world and begin to expose them only in the secure atmosphere of analysis with its freedom from criticism. Often, indeed, it is only then that they come to know what they really are. But this applies only to their describing of their symptoms: the analyst’s friendly interest and the absence of the criticism the patients anticipate never actually bring about a transformation in the symptoms. But that was exactly what happened in the case of this little girl. When she found that not only was I interested and refrained from condemning her, but that also less strict demands were made upon her at home, her anxiety was transformed under my very eyes in analysis into the wish which it concealed, while the reaction-formation turned into the instinct which it was designed to keep at bay and the precautionary measure into the threat to kill which lay behind it. But of the dread of loss of love, which surely should have broken out violently in opposition to such a reversal, there was scarcely a sign. The resistance was weaker on this side than on any other. It was as though the little girl said to herself: “If you don’t think it so very bad, then I don’t either”. And, as her demands upon herself became less exacting, gradually, as the analysis went on, she incorporated once more within herself all the tendencies which she had rejected at the cost of so much energy—her incestuous love for her father, her desire to be a boy, her death-wishes against her brothers and sisters and the recognition of her infantile sexuality. The only check was a temporary one due to the sole serious resistance when she came to what seemed the worst of all: the recognition of the direct death-wish against her mother.
Now this is not the behaviour which we are accustomed to see in the normal super-ego. Surely, adult neurotics teach us how impervious to reason that super-ego is, how obstinately it opposes every attempt at influence from without and how it refuses to modify its demands until it has been dissected in the analysis in historical sequence and every individual command and prohibition has been traced to someone who was important and beloved by the patient in childhood.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think that here we have lighted on the most important, fundamental difference between the analysis of adults and that of children. In the analysis of the adult we are at a point where the super-ego has already established its independence—an independence which is unshakable by any influence from the outside world. Here the only thing for us to do is to bring into consciousness, and thus raise to the same level, all the tendencies belonging to the id, the ego and the super-ego respectively which have played a part in the neurotic conflict. On this new level of consciousness the battle may be fought out in a new way and be brought to a different issue. But child-analysis must include all those cases in which the super-ego has as yet not reached any true independence. Only too clearly it strives to please its task-masters, the child’s parents and others responsible for his training, and in its demands it reflects every oscillation in the relation to these beloved persons and all the changes in their own views. Here, as in the analysis of adults, we work on purely analytical lines in so far as our object is to free from the unconscious those parts of the id and the ego which have already been repressed. But our work in relation to the childish super-ego is twofold: on the one hand, as analysts, in so far as the super-ego has already attained to independence, we have to assist in the dissection of the material from within, following the historical sequence, but, in addition to this, we have to use our influence from without in an educational manner by changing the child’s relation to those who are bringing him up, by providing him with new ideas and by revising the demands which the outside world is making upon him.
Let us go back once more to my little girl patient. If she had not come for treatment at the age of six probably her infantile neurosis would, like so many others, have spontaneously cleared up. In that case it is certain that it would have bequeathed to her a strict superego which would have made implacable demands on the ego and have opposed any subsequent analysis in the form of a resistance hard to overcome. But my view is that this strict super-ego appears at the end and not at the beginning of children’s neuroses.
In order to illustrate this point I would refer you to a case recently described by Dr M. W. Wulff.1 He gives an account of anxiety-attacks of the nature of phobias in a baby girl of eighteen months. It is plain that the parents of this child had exacted habits of cleanliness from her too early. The baby was unable to obey them and began to be mentally disturbed and afraid that they might send her away. Her anxiety reached the pitch of actual attacks when it was dark or when she heard strange noises, e.g. if someone knocked at the door. She asked over and over again if she were good and begged them not to send her away. The parents, much concerned, consulted Dr Wulff.
I think that the interesting thing about this early symptom is that the baby’s anxiety, which Dr Wulff immediately diagnosed as dread of the loss of love, could in no way be differentiated from the anxiety of conscience in an adult neurotic. Now, in this case, are we to believe that conscience (i.e. the super-ego) had developed so early? Dr Wulff explained to the parents that the little girl obviously was for some reason or other unequal to the demand for cleanliness, and he advised them to defer her training in this respect for a time. The parents had sufficient understanding to agree. They explained to the child that they loved her even when she wetted herself, and, whenever this happened, they repeatedly tried to calm her with assurances of their love. The success of this experiment was, as Dr Wulff tells us, striking. After a few days the child was calm and free from anxiety.
Naturally treatment of this sort is applicable but rarely, and only with very little children. I do not want you to receive the impression that I am recommending it as the only possible course. But here Dr Wulff was making the patient’s cure the test of his treatment, and this is the only test which can reveal to us what is the play of forces which is giving rise to anxiety. If the child had really fallen ill because of the excessive demands of her own super-ego, her parents’ reassurances could not have had any influence at all on her symptoms. But if the cause of her anxiety was a real fear of the displeasure of her parents as they actually existed in the outside world (and not of her imagos of them), we can easily understand her illness being cured. For Dr Wulff had removed the cause.
Quite a number of other childish reactions can be similarly explained only by the super-ego’s accessibility to influence in the early years of life. By the kindness of Dr Ferenczi I have had an opportunity of seeing the notes of a mistress at one of the modern American schools, the Walden School. This mistress, who has had a psycho-analytical training, describes how neurotic children whose home-standards are strict, and who come to her school while still at the kindgarten age, after a longer or shorter period of holding back in amazement, grow accustomed to the extraordinarily free atmosphere and gradually lose their neurotic symptoms, most of which are reactions to breaking the habit of onanism. We know that with an adult neurotic it would be impossible to produce a similar effect. The freer the environment into which he finds himself transplanted the greater is his dread of the instinct in question and, therewith, the more marked the accentuation of his neurotic defence-reactions, i.e. his symptoms. The demands made on him by his super-ego are no longer susceptible to influence from his environment. A child, on the contrary, once he begins to modify his standards, is inclined rather to go a long way in this direction and allow himself more latitude than even the freest surroundings could permit him. In this respect, as in others, he cannot do without influence from others.
And now, in conclusion, let me give a very innocent example. A little time ago I had an opportunity of listening to the talk of a five-year-old boy and his mother. The child had conceived a wish for a live horse, and the mother, for good reasons, refused to give it to him. “It doesn’t matter”, he said, nothing daunted, “I will ask for it on my next birthday”. His mother assured him that he would not have it even then. “Then I’ll ask for it at Christmas”, he said, “you can have anything then”. “No, not even at Christmas”, said his mother, trying to disillusion him. He thought for a moment. “Well, it doesn’t matter”, he said triumphantly, “I’ll buy it for myself. I will let myself have it”. You see, ladies and gentlemen, that already between his inner permission and the prohibition imposed from without there arises the conflict which may terminate in all sorts of ways: in rebellion and asocial behaviour, in neurosis and, fortunately, often in health.
Now let me say just one word about the attitude of the children’s analyst as an educationist. We have recognized that the forces arrayed against us in our fight to cure neurosis in children are not merely internal but also in part external. This gives us the right to require that the analyst shall understand aright the part played by the outward situation in which the child is placed, just as we require that he shall grasp the child’s inner situation. But in order to fulfil this part of his task a children’s analyst must have a knowledge of the theory and practice of pedagogy. This will enable him to ascertain the influences being brought to bear on the child by those who are training him, to criticize them and (if it proves necessary) to take the work of his up-bringing out of their hands for the period of the analysis and to undertake it himself.
1. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. IX., Part 3, 1928.
* Read before the Sixth International Psycho-Analytical Congress at the Hague, September 1920. Translated by R. Gabler and Barbara Low.
† Article citation:
Hug-Hellmuth, H. von (1921). On the technique of child-analysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2: 287–305.
* Held before the British Psycho-Analytical Society, May 4 and 18, 1927.
* Read before the Tenth International Psycho-Analytical Congress, Innsbruck, September 3, 1927.
† Article citation:
Freud, A. (1929). On the theory of analysis of children. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10: 29–38.