ABSTRACT
The birth of a child radically transforms a person's life – it forces one to work through one's internal relationship with one's parents, changes one's feelings for one's partner, and stimulates one to come up with creative solutions to many unexpected situations. Sigmund Freud's own account of his first attempt at child analysis emphasizes the crucial nature of the problem of technique. He stated that the technical difficulties of psychoanalysis with young children would be insurmountable for psychoanalysts unable to interpret the words of a five-year-old child without being sufficiently close to that child. This chapter explores the crucial issues that set apart the psychoanalysis of children, it may be useful to say something about what constitutes the external setting: the use of games, the room where child therapy takes place and the frequency of sessions. Play is the principal technical tool of child analysis. Adolescent analysis was given its own specific definition some 20 years after child analysis.
