ABSTRACT
The discussion about the clinical practice that takes children as analysands has filled bookshelves for a long time. Even from 1937 in Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud would say that psychoanalysis produces a ‘historical truth’, and he would insist on restoring the plots and illusions of which the child has always been part. The preventive character of Anna Freud’s child psychoanalysis becomes clear when it involves a possibly perverse or psychotic subject whose psyche could be directed since childhood to avoid any future anomalies. Since play involves anxiety and attempts to elaborate traumatic situations, Donald Winnicott correlates the importance of play with that of free association in the adult analysand. Winnicott’s research does not focus on the object as such, but on the first possession, as well as on the intermediate zone between subjectivity and what the child perceives objectively. Anxiety appears in the form of a threat of dismemberment, fragmentation and persecution against which the infant has to defend.
