ABSTRACT
The analyst must learn about the parents as individuals and their relationship with each other, with the child, and with other children in the family. In work with younger children, highlighting via scansion for instance a key signifier or a manifestation of aggression does communicate its importance to the child, and the effects of the intervention are often detectible in subsequent sessions. In children who are subjects, the in-between world of the session room is one in which the child's fantasy may appear in various play-acted scenarios. In Jacques Lacan's words, in such attempts the "analyst tries to normalise the subject's behaviour in accordance with a norm, a norm that is coherent with the analyst's own ego. Psychoanalysis takes the individual as its starting point, and the conditions for the possibility of analytic work differ depending upon the child.
