ABSTRACT
Working with children and their families offers an unparalleled opportunity to observe the oedipus complex in action. Whereas work with adults always involves looking back to childhood development, combined with direct experience in the transference and deductions from past and current behaviour, work with children gives a taste of the thing in itself in a different way. Infant observation shows how early the process begins, and observing young children shows how it goes on. However, clinical practice is interesting in so far as we can take a view of difficulties that are actually preventing emotional growth and causing something disturbed and aberrant to develop instead. The children were quite numerous and one was autistic; this child was offered intensive psychotherapy. The parents did not think they would be able to attend meetings with author together, for apparently practical reasons.
