Some Reflections on the Theory of Technique in Child Analysis

Abstract

Consideraciones leídas en las 60 Jornadas de Psicología de Niños y Adolescentes, Bs. As. 1985 y presentado en la Asociación
Psicoanalítica del Uruguay en diciembre de 1985.

With reference to a clinical clipping, I dwell on a series of thought about the analytic task with children. For several years ¡ have been concerned with reviewing Freud’s “agieren”, which has moved my thoughts toward repetition-”acting” in childhood discourse, i.e. play. Thus I take this action (play-speech) as an event full of meaning which takes place during the patient-analyst meeting. I suggest that joining the child in his play (a frequent alternative in this task) is an analytic behavior which is absolutely comparable to the silence of an adult’s analyst. From this point of view the aim of the analytic task should not lie in a systematized interpretation of childhood sexual fantasies but in a variant of his fundamental fantasies which we must derive from our listening to the plot of the patient’s conflicts. This special kind of listening actually found in the actions within the actions, allows hesitations, stumbling and incongruences to emerge and ah of these are equivalent to the lapsus, contradictions in the adult’s verbal language. I point out that analytic interpretation may participate in the “making” of play, and what matters is to know about the mediation of the meanings of our actions-playing. I stress the importance that this saying-doing of the analyst has within the listening to the child (and the re-elaboration), and 1 leave the door open to think about the scope of these “actings”.