Looking Back--and Forward--at The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.

THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC STUdY OF THE CHILD (PSOC), published in 1945, opened with the following preface by the founding editors-Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Ernst Kris: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 will be established.The Annual is an Anglo-American venture. We hope that in following volumes we may include contributions from other countries. (1945, p. 9)This simple, unprepossessing introduction brings to mind Freud's (1927) comment in The Future of an Illusion that "The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing." The preface was a kind of "declaration of independence" in that it put psychoanalysis at its center, rather than have it serve as a handmaiden to the more-established fields of psychiatry, psychology, and education. At the same time, while psychoanalysis was clearly the lodestar in the minds of The PSOC's editors, "contacts with neighboring fields" were seen as crucial to the success of their study of the child.There are many ways in which we might assess The PSOC's impact upon our understanding of children. One avenue is fairly straightforward: How do the articles that have appeared in the pages of The PSOC stand up over time? Which nuggets have proven valuable, and which have been discarded? How do the papers in volume 1 appear to us now, seventy years later?What follows is a personal assessment of The PSOC's first volume, seen through the eyes of a child analyst whose education, training, and subsequent career have included constant interaction among psychoanalysis and the "neighboring fields" referenced by The PSOC's first editors. Idiosyncratic though this review may be, it nonetheless shines a bit of light on where we started from and how we got from there to where we are now in our understanding of "the child." It also may help us to chart a course for our field and profession in the years ahead.LOOKING BACKFrom the very beginning the editors of The PSOC gathered the papers published within its pages under general headings; this was an attempt to highlight the points of contact among the papers. The twenty-five papers that appeared in volume 1 were gathered under six headings:Genetic ProblemsProblems of Child Analysis and Child DevelopmentGuidance WorkProblems of EducationProblems of Group LifeSurveys and CommentsThe section heading "Genetic Problems" requires some explanation to a twenty-first-century readership. The section itself has nothing to do with genes but instead reflects the early and enduring psychoanalytic interest in the genesis of the psyche, in both its normal and abnormal configurations. Today this might be headed, "Contributions to Psychoanalytic Developmental Theory."The section opens with Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris's classic paper, "The Genetic Approach in Psychoanalysis." Hartmann and Kris contrast dynamic and genetic perspectives and note how observational research provides important data that can't be obtained via psychoanalysis, especially in the child's preverbal period. Today they might have some interesting discussions with psychoanalysts who work with infants (for example, Salomonsson, 20141); some would say that improved attunement and observational skills on the part of analysts have contracted the terra incognita of the preverbal period, which Hartmann and Kris accepted as a given. …