ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the diagnostic approaches and treatments proposed for psychotic children by looking at a number of writers of a psychoanalytic orientation. Clinical experience and the theorizations based on it have shown the impasses that are produced by some orientations to treatment. The treatment is structured along a tripartite model that consists of two distinct stages: an introductory stage and treatment proper. In the stage Margaret Mahler calls treatment proper, the therapist attempts to induce the child to relive and understand the traumatic experiences that have prevented his development, with the aim of subsequently developing his ego. Mahler raises a series of issues through the course of treatment. Towards the end of the treatment, after the parents had decided to send the child to a special school in the United States, every interpretation would be orientated by the countertransferential irritation that the imminent interruption of treatment produced in Joyce McDougall.
