ABSTRACT
Child analysis has its own special characteristics. Since children are undergoing an accelerated process of development and, hence, are constantly changing, analysts have to enter into this process in order to guide their patients towards a healthy growth. This chapter addresses the three-level model for observing child patient transformations. The three levels are phenomenological description of transformations, identification of the main diagnostic dimensions of change, and testing of explanatory hypotheses of change. It is inspired in the work of the International Psychoanalytical Association Clinical Observation Committee and the model for adult patients developed by Dr Ricardo Bernardi as well as influenced, in reference to the clinical observation of children, by the proposals of the Hampstead Psychoanalytic Index, A systematic and valid description of change requires that the different points of reference are compared along the same dimension, or, at least, comparable dimensions.
