Influential Papers from the 1920s

R.D. Hinshelwood, Robert Hinshelwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781855753907
• eBook ISBN: 9780429914911
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The 1920s was the decade when psychoanalysis moved from the fringes of accepted medical practice into the mainstream. It also witnessed the birth of the English-language International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Freud continued to dominate the psychoanalytic arena with his continuing innovations and expansion of ideas but topics of interest outside of his inspiration also grew. The influx of women into the profession led to new discussions on female sexuality and, possibly, to greater interest in psychoanalysing children. The papers in this volume deal with substantial issues in the development of psychoanalysis that still have profound echoes in psychoanalytic discussion today. Beautifully edited, with the papers divided into their subject matter and contextualised through comprehensive and clear introductions, this is an essential anthology of classic papers with contributions from Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, Anna Freud, Edward Glover, Karen Horney, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Joan Rivière, and Hermine von Hug-Helmuth.

CHAPTER ONE
Child analysis

Hug-Hellmuth, Hermine von (1921). On the technique of child-analysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2: 287–305.

Klein, Melanie (1927). Contribution to the symposium on child-analysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 8: 339–370.

Freud, Anna (1929). On the theory of analysis of children. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10: 29–38.

The Little Hans case (Freud, 1909b) showed Freud’s interest in child observation as a means of confirming psychoanalytic developmental psychology. From before the First World War, Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth was evolving a practice of psychoanalytically applied principles to treat children. The paper, republished here, by the first non-Jew to become a member of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society, proposed certain principles for child analysis (Hug-Hellmuth, 1921*). She considered that a child does not come for treatment from his or her own motivation, that the child is in the midst of the family setting in which his or her symptoms arise, so he or she is not suffering from past experiences, and the child has no concept of changing him or herself.

She made many recommendations:

• practise analysis only with older children (her examples are mostly adolescents, and not earlier than seven years of age);
• avoid stirring up powerful feelings;
• exercise circumspection about the golden rule of openness and freedom from censorship;
• use some positive and negative transference from the beginning;
• see younger children at home, not in a consulting-room or in an institution;
• gain a rapport at the beginning and avoid resistances even by using a ruse to undermine them;
• engage in play;
• make use of “active therapy” exercises;
• be aware of the greater susceptibility to suggestion in young persons;
• recognize children’s astute awareness of the family environment;
• use non-technical language about psychoanalytic concepts;
• understand the centrality of enquiry about sexuality;
• accept that intuitive empathy is at least as important as insight for the child;
• recognize the need to sustain an explanatory relationship with the child’s family, to ensure realistic expectations, to deal with the parents’ narcissistic jealousy of the analyst, and to amplify details the child is reluctant to divulge.

In subsequent years both Anna Freud and Melanie Klein mined Hug-Hellmuth’s writings. Anna Freud tended to observe the more cautious principles, no doubt reinforced after Hug-Hellmuth’s death. She adopted these principles without acknowledgement, perhaps out of respect for Hug-Hellmuth’s wishes, but gave them a rigorous theoretical foundation (Anna Freud, 1927). Melanie Klein did acknowledge the use of play and rejected a cautious approach as indicated by one of Klein’s supporters in Berlin, Alix Strachey, who wrote in 1924: “Hug-Hellmuth’s outpourings [are] a mass of sentimentality covering the old intention of dominating at least one human being—one’s own child” (Strachey & Strachey. 1986, p. 200). Klein “wanted in the first place to separate ‘Fruhanalyse’ entirely from education (unlike Hug-Hell)” (Strachey & Strachey, 1986, p. 203).

However, despite their debt, both Anna Freud and Melanie Klein tended to be silent about Hug-Hellmuth’s contribution, and it has disappeared from view. As mentioned in the Introduction, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was murdered in 1924 by her nephew, Rudolph Hug. He was the illegitimate son of Hermine’s sister, Antonia, and Hermine adopted him as her son. She brought him up according to psychoanalytic principles, as she understood them to apply to child development. This was an old Austrian aristocratic family, which was shamed by both the illegitimate birth and the murder. However, the Viennese Society was also drastically affected by this murderous outcome of an upbringing based on psychoanalysis. It suggested a much more cautious approach to applying psychoanalysis to children—hence one of the reasons for the caution characteristic of Anna Freud’s approach.

Hug-Hellmuth’s death and the seismic tremor it created in the psychoanalytic world, together with her stiff, retiring personality, consigned her to an undeserved oblivion. Moreover, her will, made a few days before her death, stated a wish that no account of her life or work should be published, even in the psychoanalytic literature (Bernfeld, 1925, p. 106). Nevertheless, Hug-Hellmuth’s paper (and her many other writings—MacLean & Rappen, 1991) is the foundation of child analysis and her experience is as fresh today as then; hence there is good reason to republish her work.

These divergent approaches led to quite bitter exchanges later in the decade. Melanie Klein’s contribution to the symposium is republished here (Klein, 1927*). The symposium was held by the British Psychoanalytical Society, in 1927, to address Anna Freud’s criticisms (in Einführung in die Technik der Kinderanalyse; translated as Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis), is a detailed rebuttal of many points.¹ Klein’s method of child analysis had been presented in the journal (and in the Zeitschrift) prior to the symposium (Klein, 1926). Here she claims, in contrast to Anna Freud, that a full analytic situation can be established with children even as young as three years of age, and that there is no need to combine psychoanalysis with an educational aim. There is opportunity, indeed need, to explore the unconscious Oedipus complex of the child to the full depths of the unconscious; and transference, both negative and positive, is fully active and analysable without the need to coax positive feelings and dissipate negative ones. Play is equivalent to free association in adults, and shows the child to be much dominated by the unconscious and by anxiety, meaning that an analysis of children needs to penetrate to the deepest layers of the unconscious. She had found that the child’s super-ego is highly active and particularly harsh. And finally she disputed that a successful analysis will harm the child’s relations with its parents.

Anna Freud made a further statement, in 1929*. This paper, republished here, was short and clinically rich, offering an elegant argument that implicitly dismissed a number of Klein’s claims. Whilst she acknowledged Melanie Klein’s play technique, Anna Freud challenged Klein’s argument that the use of pedagogic interventions diluted the psychoanalytic. In fact, Anna Freud invited child analysts to discover that precisely this educational attitude in the analyst was what made the significant difference from an adult analysis. In justification she described the formation of the superego during latency years, and its particular susceptibility to influence by external figures (as opposed to its intractable nature in older patients); and thus its openness to therapeutic influence at this age by the analyst. Implicitly, she contradicted Klein’s view of the inherent harshness of the super-ego. So, by advising the analyst of the latency child to take the opportunity to influence the superego through an educational approach, she defended the view that Klein attacked. This paper is characteristically gentle, but firm in the defence of her own technique.

The dispute over the correct method of child analysis was never resolved. Instead it evolved as Klein introduced new ideas into psychoanalysis, such as the depressive position, internal objects, and unconscious phantasy from birth. It erupted as a conflict over the progress of psychoanalytic ideas in general during the 1940s, after the Freud family had fled the Nazis and arrived in London (King & Steiner, 1991).

Note

1. In 1947 Klein added a note to her paper indicating her belief by then that Anna Freud had moved closer to Klein’s position (see pages 168–169 of Love, Guilt and Reparation: The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume 1).

References

Bernfeld, S. (1925). Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, 6: 106–107.

Freud, A. (1927). Einfürung in die Technik der Kinderanalyse (Four Lectures on Child Analysis). Vienna: Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag.

Freud, S. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. S.E., 10: 3–149. London: Hogarth Press.

King, P., & Steiner, R. (1991). The Freud–Klein Controversies, 1941–1945. London: Routledge.

Klein, M. (1926). Infant analysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 7: 31–63.

MacLean, G., & Rappen, U. (1991). Hermine Hug-Hellmuth: Her Life and Work. London: Routledge.

Strachey, J., & Strachey, A. (1986). Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–1925. P. Meisel & W. Kendrick (Eds.). London: Chatto and Windus.

On the technique of child-analysis*†

H. Von Hug-Hellmuth

The answer to technical problems in psycho-analytic practice is never obvious.

Freud: Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, IV. Folge.

The analysis both of the child and of the adult has the same end and object; namely, the restoration of the psyche to health and equilibrium which have been endangered through influences known and unknown.

The task of the physician is fulfilled when a cure has been effected, no matter what ethical and social standards the patient pursues; it suffices that the individual becomes once more adapted to life and his vocation, and that he is no longer liable to succumb to the demands and disappointments of life.

The curative and educative work of analysis does not consist only in freeing the young creature from his sufferings, it must also furnish him with moral and aesthetic values. The object of such curative and educative treatment is not the mature man who when freed is able to take responsibility for his own actions: but the child, the adolescent, that is human beings who are still in the developing stage, who have to be strengthened through the educative guidance of the analyst, in order to become human beings with strong wills and definite aims. He who is both analyst and educator must never forget that the aim of child-analysis is character-analysis—in other words, education.

The peculiarity of the child-psyche, its special relationship to the outside world, necessitates a special technique for its analysis.

There are three considerations of fundamental importance:

1. The child does not come of his own accord to the analyst, as the grown-up does, but owing to the wish of his parents and only then (and herein he resembles the grown-up) when all other means have proved futile.
2. The child is in the midst of the very experiences which are causing his illness. The grown-up suffers from past experiences, the child from present ones; and his ever-changing experiences create a perpetually-changing relationship between himself and his surroundings.
3. The child, unlike the adult man (but very often in accordance with the attitude of women patients), has no desire at all to change himself or to give up his present attitude towards his external surroundings. His “naughtiness” creates in him a sense of great self-importance, indeed a feeling of omnipotence, owing to which he tyrannizes over the people who surround him, and his narcissism which rejoices in the continual attention which he wins from his surroundings will not allow him to give up his wickedness. To the child with strong sadistic tendencies as well as to the child with pronounced masochism, constantly recurring outbursts of fury and punishments are essential to his neurotic personality. We must also include those fortunate natures who adapt themselves even as children to every different phase of life, who remember only the pleasure of “making it up” in the continual quarrels of childhood, and who take a temporary exile in a boarding-school as a pleasant change—we mean, in short, those who can adapt themselves to every change in their environment.

For instance, a small boy, a habitual pilferer, whom I had for treatment, took all his experiences in school and at home just as “a lark” and squared his conscience in regard to his complete failure at school with the reflection: “My father did not like learning either, and yet we are doing so well.” Another twelve-year-old boy, a little truant, whom I analysed in the Vienna children’s clinic, enjoyed his stay there so much, on account of the nice food he got, that in spite of his often expressed longing for his parents, he had no desire whatever to depart.

Experience has taught me that girls at the age of puberty are more helpless when confronted by conflicts in the home life, and more sensitive to them, than are boys of the same age. The explanation of this lies partly in the fact that the girl has stronger links with her home life on account of her education aiming more at repression, partly in the fact that she has less power to overcome, by way of sublimation, the incestuous impulses which are ready to burst out at this critical period.

In the case of phobia in a five-year-old boy, Freud has shown us the method (and this has become the basis of psycho-analytic child-therapy) by which we can throw light on these psychic depths in a small child where the libidinous stirrings change into childish anxiety. At this stage of life an analysis similar to the analytic treatment of the adult is not possible. One can only apply educational methods founded on psycho-analytical knowledge. A full understanding of the child’s world of thoughts and feelings will call out its unlimited confidence, and thus a way is discovered to safeguard the child from various errors and injuries. As the training of the young child, both physical and mental, rests especially with women, it becomes essential that we should train understanding and kind-hearted women for educational psychoanalytic work.

A proper analysis according to psycho-analytical principles can only be carried out after the seventh or eighth year. But even with children at this early age the analyst must, as I will show later, turn aside from the usual routine, and satisfy himself with partial results, where he thinks that the child might be intimidated by too powerful a stirring-up of his feelings and ideas, or that too high demands upon his powers of assimilation are being made, or that his soul is disturbed instead of freed.

Generally speaking, there are two groups of these child-patients; namely, those who know from the beginning, or soon learn, in what the treatment consists, its aim and object, and those others who owing to their tender age, or to the fact that they do not suffer personally from their symptoms (for example, in the case of marked homosexual tendencies) or owing to individual factors (such as a feeble constitution) cannot be enlightened as to the object of the analytic treatment. Such children can be safely left to the idea that the analyst spends these hours with them in order to communicate some knowledge to them or to wean them from some misbehaviour, or to play with them, or from a special interest in them.

For instance a delicate thirteen-year-old boy did not doubt for a moment that I was, as his mother said, a friend of his father who was in the war, and that I came to wish the youngster Many Happy Returns of the Day. As he had an impediment in his speech he also accepted quite trustingly the further explanation that I would teach him to speak distinctly, and he actually tried himself to speak more clearly.

The mother of an eleven-year-old boy, who lived completely in his phantasies and dreams, chose, without my sanction, a form of introduction which I thought might have proved harmful. She said that a friend of hers was very much interested in children’s dreams and would like him to talk to her about his own. However the course of the analysis convinced me that no harm had been done, for the somewhat artificial accounts of dreams given in the beginning were after all only reflections of his conscious and unconscious day-dreams.

No rule can be laid down for the appropriate moment to tell the patient the aim of these talks; experience and personal tact are the only reliable guides.

In close connection with the above matter is the formulating of the obligations which must be carried out by the adult patient at the beginning as a sine qua non if a cure is to be effected. Right from the beginning one understands that in the case of the second type of psycho-analytic patients one must abandon the demand for absolute openness, and uncensored expression of everything which comes into the mind, and instead put forward this obligation only at some favourable opportunity. In the case of the first-mentioned group, however, those more mature young people who often have already had instruction concerning psycho-analysis from some other member of the family who has already undergone treatment, it is often suitable in the very first hour to demand that they shall be completely frank and shall not talk over the treatment with their comrades, their brothers and sisters, or other members of the family. Of course, in connection with this enjoining of secrecy, we must not overlook that commands and prohibitions are the very means of tempting the young to transgress.

The period of time devoted to the child’s analysis is generally conditioned by the attendance at school, which the parents do not want on any account to be shortened. Apart from the few cases where the young patient has special difficulties in preserving the continuity, I have always found that three or four hours a week, if the analysis is carried on long enough, leads to successful results. An exact keeping to time appears to me of the greatest importance. It involves a self-education which the young person must undergo. Sometimes it needs strong self-control to reject some important communication which the child has kept back till the end of the hour, but to concede to such demands would mean that the patient was allowed to get the upper hand.

While the educative analysis of children of more mature age (say from fourteen to eighteen) resembles more that of the grown-up—for in the very first hours, we can speak of the factors in the treatment, of positive and negative transference, of resistance, and of the significance of the unconscious psychic tendencies in the whole of our experience—the analysis of the younger or backward child proceeds on different lines from the beginning.

I consider it inadvisable to take the young patient to the consultation with the analyst. The child feels himself exposed and humiliated while he waits in another room during the consultation, and often this creates in him excitement, may be anxiety, resentment, defiance, shame, all of which endangers the subsequent treatment, or at least makes the beginning much more difficult. If one has to break down a resistance before getting an opportunity to build a bridge of mutual understanding, one is, so to speak, confronted with a task similar to that of clearing away a heap of débris which lies at the other side of a yawning chasm.

Just as the first meeting between the analyst and the young patient should take place in the latter’s home, so should it be with the treatment itself. The analysis must go on independently of the whims of the patient, who can very cleverly contrive to have a slight indisposition which prevents him coming, or arriving in time, or he may play truant in the analysis hour. The child not only lacks interest in the money problem (which for the grown-up is a continual stimulus to make him ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• SERIES PREFACE
• ABOUT THE EDITOR
• Introduction to the journal in the 1920s
• CHAPTER ONE Child analysis
• CHAPTER TWO Phantasy and sublimation
• CHAPTER THREE Female sexuality
• CHAPTER FOUR Active technique
• CHAPTER FIVE Character formation
• CHAPTER SIX Super-ego
• CHAPTER SEVEN The sense of reality
• CHAPTER EIGHT Lay analysis