ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a case of Katiebell who had been sexually abused from the age of eighteen months by her younger brother. Technically, the clinical work could be said to have depended mainly on an approach that owed much to Anna Freud and to D. W. Winnicott. Both these theoretical clinicians emphasise the necessity of the defences, however apparently maladaptive, and the need to acknowledge and evince curiosity about them rather than immediately to confront. It is also in the writings of Anna Freud and Winnicott that one finds such an emphasis on the adaptation of psychoanalysis that is psychoanalytic child psychotherapy. The capacity to be responsive to the child starts with the in-tune, good-enough mother: Katiebell could gradually risk engaging with curiosity and learnt that she could be met and "known" in this process.