ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the case study of Lena. Lena suffered from depressive moods and insecure self-esteem when she began Psychoanalytic Child Therapy a year after her parents separated. The psychodynamic examination situation helps the therapist to form a picture of the child and the possible conflicts in his/her life, and to draw up initial psychodynamic hypotheses. The therapist connects these spontaneous drawings with her own thoughts developed from her internal functioning, and, thus, moves towards an understanding of the child's unconscious contents as revealed in the drawing. The therapist found the defencelessness of the "cloud sea-lion" very touching, as Ferdinand was also showing her that he, too, often felt at someone's mercy and that his rages and motor excitability at kindergarten were often a manoeuvre to face this fear of "falling apart". In the work with the child, the therapist oscillates between focal and afocal psychoanalytic techniques.
