ABSTRACT
This chapter offers how psychoanalytic work with very young children can attend to difficulties in spatial organization and orientation and further contribute to stability and security in object relations and identity. In essence, the chapter discusses the relationship between inside and outside. It considers how analysts develop a sense of orientation in relation to internal and external worlds and how they take shape and link up. In relation to his description of "two-dimensional" relationships between one's inner and outer worlds, Donald Meltzer describes how the circumstances that threaten the inherent changelessness of the state would tend to be experienced as a breakdown of the surfaces. While Meltzer was largely taking the lead in his theoretical formulations of dimensionality from autistic patients, there are similar accounts of phenomena of the kind within the clinical work with children who are fostered and adopted, particularly with the children whose experience of trauma and environmental failure took place in their earliest years.
