ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the importance of two concepts for understanding analytic work with the child and the adolescent: the first is the preconscious and the second is Oedipus as an attractor. What is commonly described as “contemporary analysis”, starting particularly from the vertex of the contributions of André Green concerning non-neurotic situations, raises seriously the question of the preconscious, especially as, like the whole of the first topography, it is undermined in the context of such clinical situations. The numerous contributions by Green over the last decade, in which he has explored in depth the question of the second topography as well as that of the death drive, attest to this. A personal example is that of a child/parent psychoanalytic therapeutic consultation which makes it possible, at least in situations that go beyond the indications of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, to carry out work that is nonetheless psychoanalytic within situations marked by a dysfunctioning of représentance.
