ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is usually seen as a therapy for emotional problems, but psychoanalysts also consider it a research technique and a theory of psychology. Similarly, "child analysis" is seen as a therapeutic technique, though analysts consider it important for two other reasons: the light it throws on theories of emotional development, and the role it can play in the training of a psychoanalyst of adults. In June 1970, the European Psychoanalytical Federation organized a symposium on "The role of child analysis in the formation of the psycho-analyst"; the papers given by Rene Diatkine, Anna Freud, and Hanna Segal were published in 1972 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and are well worth re-reading. Reading clinical accounts of child analysis or child psychotherapy cases, whatever the pathology of the child, the same mechanisms and concepts so familiar from adult analysis are put forward to explain the behaviour and/or utterances of the child.
