Introduction

In the classic account of psychoanalysis, it is childhood that provides the key to the ailments of the suffering adult patient. The experiences and fantasies of the first few years of life, visceral, uncanny and mostly unresolved, continue to inhabit us in ways that we are not conscious of, and throw more or less serious obstacles in our path as we attempt to progress through life. Thus, the psychoanalyst's main task is seen as providing an access to this childhood world that survives in the psyche, hidden, distorted but intact, and, in so doing, to defuse its hold over the patient.It is significant yet paradoxical that, in this account, ‘the child’ means above all the child that lives on in the adult, fleshed out in retrospect through the therapeutic encounter, the dialogue between patient and analyst. Even though some of the earliest published psychoanalytic cases, such as Freud's (1909) ‘Analysis of a phobia in a five year old boy’ and Ferenczi's (1913) ‘The little rooster man’, were each essentially based on the observation of a troubled little boy as he interacted with his family, it would be decades before the so-called ‘talking cure’ came to be seriously deemed applicable to the dependent, sometimes pre-verbal, young, and child psychoanalysis considered as something more than a quirky, lesser offshoot of the main profession, the psychoanalysis of adults (Geissmann and Geissmann, 1998). However, it will be argued that it is precisely the idea of the child as part of a network of social relationships that provides psychoanalysis with the impetus to question itself as a profession and a discipline.

The tasks that this chapter sets itself are multi-fold. On the one hand, it will recount how, in Britain, the analysis of children emerged from the years of the Second World War as an acceptable, even high-profile, professional activity, marking and defining British psychoanalysis generally. This development was partly due to the particular nature of internal theoretical and institutional conflicts, known as the Controversial Discussions, which divided psychoanalytic practitioners during those years and the specific interest that the two leaders in the conflict, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, had in treating children. It will be necessary to address the background and the theoretical underpinnings of the disputes in order to understand what was at stake in the idea of analysing a child and how this influenced the general development of psychoanalysis in Britain.