A History of Child Psychoanalysis

the late Pierre Geissmann, Claudine Geissmann, Pierre Geissmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134830022
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Child analysis has occupied a special place in the history of psychoanalysis because of the challenges it poses to practitioners and the clashes it has provoked among its advocates. Since the early days in Vienna under Sigmund Freud child psychoanalysts have tried to comprehend and make comprehensible to others the psychosomatic troubles of childhood and to adapt clinical and therapeutic approaches to all the stages of development of the baby, the child, the adolescent and the young adult.

Claudine and Pierre Geissmann trace the history and development of child analysis over the last century and assess the contributions made by pioneers of the discipline, whose efforts to expand its theoretical foundations led to conflict between schools of thought, most notably to the rift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein.

Now taught and practised widely in Europe, the USA and South America, child and adolescent psychoanalysis is unique in the insight it gives into the psychological aspects of child development, and in the therapeutic benefits it can bring both to the child and its family.

PART I
The day before yesterday: beginnings in Vienna (1905– 20)

Introduction

This period, the building up of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, would also see the outlines of what was to become child psychoanalysis. Well before 1900, Freud had already worked in paediatric departments. Following the publication of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905, the Psychoanalytical Society of Vienna started to become interested in the sexuality of young children. The Society’s Wednesday evening discussions became very heated, all the more so since those present were using examples taken from their own families, mentioning the ‘exploits’ of their own young children. Carl Jung in Zurich and Karl Abraham in Berlin also took part enthusiastically, and corresponded with Freud on the subject. His correspondence with Jung, through which permeates the unease which would lead to their separation, sometimes takes an amusing turn; for instance, when Freud writes to Jung: ‘I hope Agathli [Jung’s daughter] is original and hadn’t heard the story of Little Hans?’ At other times it is moving, such as when Mrs Jung tries to get the dual message across to Freud that it is not easy to be the father of his children, nor that of…Jung. ‘I wanted to ask…if you were sure that your children could not be helped by analysis. One is not to the son of a great man without impunity if one has such difficulty in casting off ordinary fathers…wasn’t your son’s broken leg in the same vein?’ (Freud and Jung, 1974).

The publication of the analysis of little Hans in this climate was a significant event, because it confirmed Freud’s theoretical views and also because it demonstrated that it was possible to carry out analytic treatment on a young child under certain conditions.

It was difficult at that time to know where this interest in child psychoanalysis would lead. Should the number of observations of the child be multiplied in order to confirm psychoanalytical theory? Should the dream of a psychoanalytical education to ensure the prevention of neuroses be pursued? Sándor Ferenczi’s communication at the Salzburg conference in 1908 entitled: ‘What practical guidance does the Freudian experience provide for the education of the child?’ was a step in this direction. Should there be more analytical treatment for children? How should this be carried out?

The group was teeming with ideas. Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was the most persistent in her research and was the first to carry out analytical treatment on children. A teacher by training, she held bold views on child sexuality and education, for which many would never forgive her. Her murder and the particular circumstances surrounding it provided the opportunity for hateful attacks on Freudian theories.

1
Sigmund Freud

In the beginning, my statements about infantile sexuality were founded almost exclusively on the findings of analysis in adults which led back into the past. I had no opportunity of direct observations on children. It was therefore a very great triumph when it became possible years later to confirm almost all my inferences by direct observation and the analysis of very young children—a triumph that lost some of its magnitude as one gradually realized that the nature of the discovery was such that one should really be ashamed of having had to make it. The further one carried these observations on children, the more self-evident the facts became; but more astonishing, too, did it become that one had taken so much trouble to overlook them.

(Freud, 1914a:18)

Sigmund Freud’s discovery and elaboration of psychoanalysis was something which took much longer than is generally recognized.

When, with the help of a bursary, the young Sigmund Freud went to attend Charcot’s courses in Paris in 1885, he was 29. He had already done considerable work in the field of neuro-pathology, histology in particular, but, as he himself said: ‘I understood nothing about neuroses at that time’ (1925a). However, he did become interested to some extent in young children early on and published a number of works on both unilateral and bilateral cerebral paralysis in children (Freud and Rie, 1891; Freud, 1893). In 1886, he spent several weeks in Adolf Baginski’s paediatric department in Berlin. He was then appointed head of the new neurological unit at the public Institute of Paediatrics in Vienna run by the paediatrician Kassowitz. ‘Freud held this position for many years, working there for several hours three times a week and he made there some valuable contributions to neurology’ (Jones, 1953, Vol. I:233). At the same time he set up in private practice as a ‘specialist in nervous disorders’. His patients became less and less ‘neurological’ and more and more ‘nervous’. For the former there was no effective treatment anyway. With the latter he mainly used suggestion and hypnosis, and this led him to the theoretical and clinical field where he was to come into his own. Freud had said: ‘from the very first I made use of hypnosis in another manner, apart from hypnotic suggestion. I used it for questioning the patient upon the origin of his symptom’ (Freud, 1925a:19).

To develop his technique, Freud had based himself on an observation by his friend Josef Breuer dating back to 1880–2. Hypnosis had enabled Breuer to find in Anna O. links between symptoms of severe hysteria and reminiscences of ‘traumatic’ experiences going back in particular to a period when she was looking after her sick father. The therapy used abreactions:¹ it was a cathartic treatment. It was while trying for many years to understand this case in the light of experience with other patients that Freud was able to make progress. In particular the question was to elucidate the erotic transference that the patient had made to Breuer and his positive counter-transference. Breuer was not able (or unconsciously did not want) to see the phenomenon, in spite of the phantom pregnancy of his patient during the treatment and the jealousy of his wife. He even went as far as saying that Anna O.’s sexual side was surprisingly underdeveloped. To get beyond this stage, Freud had to discover the mechanism of repression, the existence of the unconscious, the role of transference and the major role played by sexuality.

But in 1895 Freud had not yet reached that point. His reflections led him to write Studies on Hysteria. He himself said on the subject (Freud, 1925a): ‘In the case histories which I contributed to the Studies sexual factors played a certain part, but scarcely more attention was paid to them than to other emotional excitations…. It would have been difficult to guess from the Studies on Hysteria what an importance sexuality has in the aetiology of the neuroses’ (p. 22).

The progress from catharsis to psychoanalysis was not easy: it can be dated to the period 1895 to 1900–2. These dates correspond to Freud’s self-analysis, which indicates the energy he must have expended, the resistance he must have had to overcome and the inward searching he would have had to perform. Didier Anzieu’s excellent book L’auto-analyse de Freud (1986) is proof of this.

Having discovered the role of ‘trauma’ in the genesis of hysteria, Freud was obliged to admit that there was a still earlier trauma to which the present trauma referred. The earlier trauma was a seduction, a sexual transgression, generally paternal in origin. The notion that the trauma itself was of an essentially sexual nature was not easily admitted, and Breuer had fled from this. But the truly agonizing reappraisal was the discovery of the active role played by the child in sexual seduction, and even more so, the discovery of the imaginary role of the adult in the seduction scene. It was at this point that Freud pronounced his celebrated renunciation of his ‘neurotica’.

A century later, the active sexual role of the infant is not always acknowledged, not only by opponents of psychoanalysis, which is after all only quite natural, but even by a large number of psychoanalysts themselves, whose theories show that these factors have not been taken into consideration, even if they consciously and officially admit their existence.

Freud resisted as long as he could. His first thesis was that sexual advances by adults led to early stimulation of the child. ‘He did not at first believe that such events could arouse immediate sexual excitement in the child. It was only later, nearing puberty that the memory of the incidents in question would have an effect’ (Jones, 1953:353).

In 1895 Freud had written that reminiscences only become traumatic years after the events themselves have taken place. In 1896 it was a question of ‘slight sexual excitement’ in the early infantile period but purely autoerotic, there being no relation between the excitement and another person. In 1897, after having intuitively discovered erotogenic zones, he made a fundamental discovery: more than simply responding to a perverse act by the parents or to the simple sexual desires of its parents towards it, a child has incestuous desires towards its parents, generally the one of the opposite sex. Ernest Jones describes this research in detail:

Even then Freud had not really arrived at the conception of infantile sexuality as it was later to be understood. The incest wishes and phantasies were later products, probably between the ages of 8 and 12, which were thrown back on to the screen of early childhood. They did not originate there. The most that he would admit was that young children, even infants of six to seven months old [(!)], had the capacity to register and in some imperfect way to apprehend the meaning of sexual acts between the parents that had been seen or overheard (May 2, 1897). Such experiences would become significant only when the memory of them was re-animated by several phantasies, desires or acts…

The first forms of sexual excitation in early childhood that Freud recognized were what are now called pre-genital ones and concerned the two alimentary orifices, mouth and anus. These could still be regarded as auto-erotic. It was much harder to admit that the young child might have genital wishes concerning a parent which could in many respects be comparable with adult ones. And to recognize the full richness of the child’s sexual life in terms of active impulses was a still further step that Freud took only later with his usual caution….

Even in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in which the Oedipus complex is described, one finds what might be called an encapsuled fossil from earlier times in which it is assumed that children are free from sexual desires; the footnote correcting it was only added in the third edition of the book (1911).

There is therefore no doubt that over a period of some five years Freud regarded children as innocent objects of incestuous desires, and only very slowly—no doubt against considerable inner resistance—came to recognize what ever since has been known as infantile sexuality. As long as possible, he restricted it to a later age, the phantasies being believed to be projected backwards on to the earlier one, and to the end of his life, he chose to regard the first year of infancy as a dark mystery enshrouding dimly apprehensible excitations rather than active impulses and phantasies.

(Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. I, 1953:355–6)

In 1914, Freud stated this discovery of infantile sexuality with the utmost caution. It is true that the uncovering of the infantile libido had already won him some most violent attacks, but Freud’s own mental resistance had also to be reckoned with its repression ever active, as is normal:

Enquirers often find more than they bargain for. One was drawn further and further back into the past; one hoped at last to be able to stop at puberty, the period in which the sexual impulses are traditionally supposed to awake. But in vain; the tracks led still further back into childhood and into its earlier years.

(Freud, 1914a:17)

And, further on, he notes:

If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in phantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. This reflection was soon followed by the discovery that these phantasies were intended to cover up the autoerotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now, from behind the phantasies, the whole range of a child’s sexual life came to light.

(Freud, 1914a:17–18)

Freud thus made this discovery against his will. In 1925 he noted: ‘I was not prepared for this conclusion and my expectations played no part in it, for I had begun my investigation of neurotics quite unsuspectingly’ (Freud, 1925a:24).

One could still protect oneself with the ‘medical’ aspect of sexuality: its chemistry was as yet unknown, but it governed sexual excitation and meant that neuroses resembled endocrine disorders such as Basedow’s disease (hyperthyroidosis) (Freud, 1925a:25).

Because infantile sexuality was a novelty in those days, Freud’s discovery was

a contradiction of one of the strongest human prejudices. Childhood was looked upon as innocent and free from the lusts of sex, and the fight with the demon of ‘sensuality’ was not thought to begin until the troubled age of puberty. Such occasional sexual activities as it had been impossible to overlook in children were put down as signs of degeneracy or premature depravity or as a curious freak of nature. Few of the findings of psychoanalysis have met with such universal contradiction or have aroused such an outburst of indignation as the assertion that the sexual function starts at the beginning of life and reveals its presence by important signs even in childhood. And yet no other finding of analysis can be demonstrated so easily and so completely.

(Freud, 1925a:33)

But how was this to be demonstrated? As we shall see, between 1902 and 1910 it would be necessary to study the children themselves (the effects of that decade are still being felt today).

It was during the meetings of the circle of Freud’s first students that this study of children was undertaken. The Wednesday psychoanalytical evenings which, from 1902 onwards, took place in Freud’s rooms, were to become the Wednesday Evening Sessions. The Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna, founded in 1908, arose out of these meetings, which then became part of its official activities. Reports of these meetings dating back to 1906 are still available to us (see Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vols I– IV, 1906–18).

The task the members of this rather mixed group set themselves was to endeavour to understand psychoanalysis and to gain ground in this field. They did this with the various means at their disposal, some by analysing patients, others by commenting on philosophical, psychological or literary texts, and yet others by studying themselves. In this last category we might mention Rudolf von Urbantschitsch, who, on 15 January 1908, gave a paper entitled: ‘My developmental years until marriage.’ The participants discussed in learned fashion whether his onanism was harmful or whether it was just the struggle against the urge to masturbate that was harmful. An analysis of the speaker was then undertaken. Freud analysed his feminine side and his exhibitionism. Hitschmann emphasized that ‘it is of great interest to know what has become of a man with such a history (1906–8, p. 283); Isidore Sadger studied his perversions and indicated that ‘It is a question whether the speaker is really quite as healthy as has been asserted’ (p. 284); Max Graf (the father of little Hans) said that ‘one would have to assume that the speaker is severely hysterical’. Freud said that this was not so, since neurosis does not exist when repression is successful. In his response the ‘speaker’ acknowledged his ‘psychic sadism’, but disputed that he was a homosexual or a pervert (p. 285).

We have mentioned this discussion to show that in this sort of atmosphere, talking about one’s own children would not be found shocking in any way.

One sentence from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality clearly indicates the tasks assigned to the Wednesday researchers:

A formula begins to take shape which lays it down that the sexuality of neurotics has remained in, or been brought back to, an infantile state. Thus our interest turns to the sexual life of children, and we will now proceed to trace the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality till its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

(S.Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905:172)

These tasks are mentioned again in the article on little Hans: ‘With this end in view I have for many years been urging my pupils and my friends to collect observations of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I The day before yesterday: beginnings in Vienna (1905– 20)
• Part II Yesterday: two schools, three cities—Vienna, Berlin and London (1920–45)
• Part III Today: the spread of child psychoanalysis throughout the world from 1945
• Part IV and tomorrow?
• Bibliography
• Interviews