Technique in Child and Adolescent Analysis

This book presents central aspects of the concept technique in psychoanalysis and discusses their significance for child analysis. Technique, in a more outward but nevertheless much-discussed sense, covers the basic set-up of the treatment, the setting and adaptations to the developmental stage of the child. In a more comprehensive sense, technique can be understood as the totality of the means used to enable a therapeutic relationship and to set a psychoanalytical process in motion. In view of current developments, the different standpoints taken up by Anna Freud and Melanie Klein in their discussions on the technique of child analysis – in particular as regards transference and the technique of interpretation – now seem dated and no longer appropriate to the current understanding of a dynamic interaction between analyst and child. A more complex concept of interpretation as the central instrument of psychoanalytic work can expand therapeutic possibilities in child analysis and can help establish a fresh understanding of the therapeutic process in its theory too.

Contributors:
Elisabeth Brainin, Antonino Ferro, Michael Günter, Kai von Klitzing, Helga Kremp-Ottenheym, Maria Rhode, Angelika Staehle