Otto Fenichel

The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child is an annual journal, published by Taylor & Francis, which contains scholarly articles on topics related to child psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The journal was founded in 1945 by Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Ernst Kris, and was previously published by Yale University Press. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child is the official journal for the Association for Child Psychoanalysis. It is recognized as a preeminent source of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Published annually, it focuses on presenting carefully selected and edited representative articles featuring ongoing analytic research as well as clinical and theoretical contributions for use in the treatment of adults and children. Initiated in 1945, under the early leadership of Anna Freud, Kurt and Ruth Eissler, Marianne and Ernst Kris, this series of volumes soon established itself as a leading reference source of study. To look at its contributors is to be confronted with the names of a stellar list of creative, scholarly pioneers who willed a rich heritage of information about the development and disorders of children and their influence on the treatment of adults as well as children. An innovative section, The Child Analyst at Work, periodically provides a forum for dialogue and discussion of clinical process from multiple viewpoints. The contribution of psychoanalysis to the study of the child covers many areas. In therapy the range extends from child analysis to child guidance and group work; in theory, from the basic problems of genetic psychology to those concerned with the interrelation of culture and the upbringing of the child. While many psychiatric techniques and many concepts upon which psychologists and educators rely bear the imprint of psychoanalytic thought, contributions to this Annual center on psychoanalytic hypotheses. It is hoped that from this center contacts with neighboring fields Vfill be established. The Annual is an Anglo-American venture. We hope that in following volumes we may include contributions from other countries. [Preface of the Editors to Volume 1, 1945]

It might be expected that all the subjects with which psychoanalytic literature deals, questions involving what actually takes place in a psychoanalytic treatment and how the analyst's part therein may be made most effective would predominate. But this expectation does not prove to be correct. Questions of technique are approached in only a small proportion of psychoanalytic writings. This fact may have various causes. In the first place, because the young science of psychoanalysis has as its object of study the totality of human mental phenomena, it must set itself so many questions that the problem of therapeutic technique becomes just one subject among many others. Second, analysts doubtless have a particular aversion to a detailed discussion of this subject, based in part on subjective uncertainty or restraint, but to a greater extent based upon the objective difficulties of the matter itself. A third reason is however the decisive one: the infinite multiplicity of situations arising in analysis does not permit the formulation of general rules about how the analyst should act in every situation, because each situation is essentially unique. Freud 1 therefore declared a long time ago that just as in chess, only the opening moves and some typical concluding situations are teachable, but not all that goes on in between and comprises the actual analytic work. Nor can this presentation dispel those difficulties inherent in the subject. In the transcript of a course of lectures given in 1936 in Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, these discussions presuppose in the reader an elementary understanding of analytic technique as well as a knowledge of the general theory of neuroses. They do not attempt to fill the place of a textbook on technique for which the time is not yet ripe, but rather, as the title states, they deal with selected problems of technique. The selection of problems is such that I am prepared to hear the objection that my discussions are 'too theoretical'. But I know from experience that one circumstance often makes particular difficulties for inexperienced analysts: they may react in their analytic practice in a thoroughly free and elastic manner, and they may also show a good knowledge of the theoretical concepts; however, their practical and their theoretical knowledge remain to a certain extent isolated from each other. It is difficult for them to recognize again the well understood theoretical concepts in what they see and experience in the patient, and still more in what they themselves say and do during the analytic hour. [from author's Preface]