ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some characteristics of the latency child: orientation towards learning, easy to interest, accepting of guidance. This phase of development is described as the "golden age of childhood", and is accordingly rather pleasant for teachers. Clinical experience in psychoanalysis, however, has shown that almost 70 per cent of all children who receive therapy are in this age group, most of them boys. Melanie Klein conducted her first analyses with small children. With latency children as well, she attempted to first diminish the child's fears, interpreting unconscious conflicts and transference; with his anxiety relieved, the child could experience the sense and procedure of analysis. In general, the games of latency children are reality-oriented; on the one hand, fantasy is now more suppressed, and on the other hand the child's ego can take the reality principle more into consideration.
