ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapy as practised at the Tavistock Clinic has two main roots: one is its psychoanalytic theoretical base; the second is its base in the observation of infants and young children. Freud developed a new theory of man and of mind at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Projection is a widely used term; it has a particular relevance to the author's work in understanding the interactions both ways between children and their carers. Projection is the mechanism by which a person places unwanted aspects and emotions belonging to the self into another, normally in order to get rid of them. Projective identification was used by Klein to describe a particularly powerful form of projection. Klein saw it primarily as evacuative. The relevance of this process for deprived and disturbed children, who may have had limited experience of early receptive and containing mothering, is clear.
