ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents a picture of what sort of experience psychoanalytical child psychotherapy is for patient and therapist. It aims to provide an account of intensive long-term psychotherapy with a young child. In this sense it offers an example of the classical experience of psychoanalytic child psychotherapy from which so many of the developments described in later chapters have sprung. The boy, Matthew, referred to the clinic in his sixth year, was thus attending during the period of his latency years and was, in terms of age, therefore, representative of a major group of child referrals. Child analysts and therapists have, on the whole, emphasized the continuities between child and adult work and have demonstrated similar emotional processes at work in both. This has borne a great fruit of understanding. Thinking, collaborative or otherwise, is not the only thing that goes on in psychoanalytic inquiry and certainly not in child psychotherapy.
