ABSTRACT
The Anna Freud Centre presents a powerful ongoing oscillation between a deep understanding of analytic theory and technique and an equally deep clinical resonance with the experience of the patient. One of so many examples would be a recent case discussion in which a teenager asked her therapist to help her get a cup of water. This was interpreted productively in terms of this patient’s wish for nurturing that had been absent in her early childhood. Analytic theory and technique has always been central to our thinking at these international meetings. At the same time there is a deep base of pooled clinical experience that takes into account where patients are at that point in the treatment, and in his or her relationship to the particular analyst. When Anna Freud wrote Normality and Pathology in Childhood in 1965, the technique of child analysis was based on Freud’s model for the analysis of the neurotic adult.
