ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic social work for babies, toddlers, and preschool children supplements institutional early education and early intervention services as they have gradually been built up across the country or are in the process of being so. Oddly, considering that psychoanalytic teaching has been intensively concerned with educational practice in crèches and nursery schools right from the start, psychoanalytic social work lacks an anchorage in these fields of work. Psychoanalytic insights have been fruitful for educational work with children with both normal and disturbed development as well as those with other impairments. Children’s centres offer outpatient counselling and therapy services and may in particular cases offer inpatient mother and child therapies in cooperation with a clinic. In specific cases with children who are hard to integrate it also makes sense, at least for a time, to have the child accompanied within the institutional structures with the aim of finally integrating the child in a special needs nursery school.
