ABSTRACT
Most children’s fears and phobias are not symptoms of major psychopathology and can be effectively treated by a variety of procedures. As the developmental aspects of anxiety became increasingly crucial to S. Freud’s theory, he later reinterpreted Little Hans’s phobia to illustrate his revised theory of neurosis. Applying psychometric methods to behavioral ratings by informants such as parents and teachers, factor analyses of behavior checklists have identified syndromes of behaviors indicative of anxiety in a variety of clinical samples. Childhood anxiety has been a central variable in major theories of psychopathology. Assessment of childhood anxiety has generally involved extrapolation of adult measures of children, and Rachel Gittelman discusses some possible relations between child and adult anxiety phenomena. Early psychoanalytic and behavioral theories blamed later psychopathology on early childhood anxiety and used child case histories to illustrate hypothesized pathological mechanisms.
