ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic theory has always been concerned with the behaviour of the child as a key to understanding the behaviour of the adult. However, in order to understand a child's behaviour, it is necessary to understand the child's world and to realize that it is not simply the adult's world in miniature. For instance, the adult's world is filled with many people are recognized through an intricate network of relationships. This world is filled with thousands of objects and people and these combine to form a myriad of experiences providing pain or pleasure, happiness or sadness, together with a host of less intense feelings that often pass unnoticed. Freud helped people to understand that the child's world is simpler than the adult's, containing only a small number of objects and, more importantly, inhabited by only one or two people who dominate it. This world provides only intense experiences, with sharply defined feelings of pleasure that can completely flood the child's emotions.
