ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates some aspects of clinical casework as conducted by a group of child psychotherapists. Anna Freud defined the task of psychoanalysis as follows: 'To acquire the fullest possible knowledge of all the institutions which the psychic personality to be constituted and to learn what are their relations to one another and to the outside world. The technique of psychoanalysis is certainly aimed towards verbalization. In cases where the capacity for verbal expression is either inhibited or retarded, the therapist's verbal communication may have to be brief and very much to the point. Anna Freud suggested that one factor contributing to borderline and outright psychotic states may indeed be the failure to experience pleasure with the object, or with the help of the object. The immediate clinical aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve the patient's illness by means of interpretation of the transference and resistances.
