ABSTRACT
As Edward Glover pointed out as early as 1954, there is an urgent need for psychoanalytic treatments to include long-term follow-up assessments. For adult analysis, Glover believed, a minimum period of five years after analysis was necessary to assess the long-term outcome; but the success of a child analysis, he wrote, "cannot be satisfactorily checked until an after-history of 15 years has been secured". Subjects who had appeared to be suffering as children from pervasive and deep-seated psychopathology would show serious impairment of emotional and social adjustment as adults, unless they had received long-term and intensive psychoanalytic help, and also that differences between the outcomes of intensive and non-intensive treatment would be much narrower among the treated children with less severe pathology. Incidentally, the follow-up study aimed to contrast different theoretical expectations about the long-term outcome of child psychoanalysis.
