ABSTRACT
The treatment of children with a clear psychotic symptomology faces the same difficulties as treatment of psychotic adults: the management of the transference and the position of the analyst, the type of intervention, and the orientation of treatment towards a delusional contouring or towards the creation of a stabilizing suppletion. A perspective which is concerned with the creation of a “suppleance” is a preliminary to any work with psychotic children. With a three-part treatment, involving mother, child, and therapist, that Margaret Mahler proposes for the disorder she calls “infantile symbiosis”, she tries to teach the mother how to gain contact with the child and invites her to identify herself with the model offered by the therapist. The child’s rudimentary ego tends to develop simultaneously. The analytic arrangement is reduced to the construction of a container, a limit which contains the child.
