ABSTRACT
Adult analysis confronts us less with the impossibility of “analysing everything” than with its pointlessness, the “utility” of it having more to do with the acquisition of a self-analytic functioning faced with the permanence of unconscious activity. Child analysis, on the other hand, confronts us with an additional limit, that of the elaboration of unconscious phantasies, given that this can only occur within the framework of an adult analysis, after the ananké of the second phase represented by adolescence. The aim of a child analysis, especially when it is conducted up until adolescence – as is the case in the example below – is not so much to analyse everything as to help the child to acquire a certain type of functioning. The traces of his (or her) experience will permit him, if ever he does further analytic work as an adult, to engage in the process differently, elaborating contents that were out of his reach before.
