ABSTRACT
In the 1920s and 1930s period of psychoanalytic work, and long before child analysis came into being, there was a strong tendency to keep the relations between analysis and surface observation wholly negative and hostile. When hysterical symptoms, frigidity, impotence, etc., were traced back to prohibitions and the subsequent repressions of sex in childhood, psychoanalytic upbringing put on its program a lenient and permissive attitude toward the manifestations of infantile, pregenital sexuality. The close-up view of childhood which developed over the years on the basis of child analytic work provides for the child analyst an approach to personality development which differs subtly from that of those colleagues who see children through the medium of the adult only. There was from then onwards an additional source of material for the systematic building up of a psychoanalytic child psychology, and the integration of the two kinds of data, direct and reconstructed, became a rewarding task.
