ABSTRACT
This chapter makes a somewhat artificial and arbitrary division of psychoanalytic scientific progress into three phases. They are: the understanding of personal instinctual life and of interpersonal relationships, the understanding of moods and of the origin of ideas of persecution both within and without, and the understanding of primitive emotional tasks, such as the development of a relationship to external reality, integration of the personality, and the sense of body. A child who is depressed has ideas that there are bad things going on inside him; his fantasy of his body is indirectly affected by this. The authors' concern in the study of the child along these lines is to understand and describe the psychology of the emotions. In each case the authors want to know about actual instinctual experience, and about the effect of continued excitement without climax, and also the effect on the body of a specific inhibition of an instinctual process.
