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In his last years his daughter Anna did more than appear with him, holding his arm tactfully, smiling faintly while he looked ever serious (and defiant in the pain he constantly suffered). By 1926, at the age of thirty-one, she was a psychoanalyst specializing in child analysis. That year she gave a series of lectures, later published as The Psychoanalytical Treatment of Children, on the special requirements of therapeutic work with young boys and girls: earning their confidence, communicating with them in the absence of words, developing ways to explain their troubles to them, ensuring that what is won in treatment is not lost in the home or school. The following year, at the Tenth International Psychoanalytic Congress, held in Innsbruck, she read a paper rich in its theoretical discussion of the difference between analyzing adults and children. Adults know their suffering, and have developed characteristic styles of dealing with the various demands of the world, the devil, and the flesh. In contrast, children quite often have no idea that they are ill, want no help from an analyst, and are in the midst of growth, so that rather than presenting the fait accompli--that is, the neurosis which represents a "solution" to the various and conflicting demands of the mind--the child offers the challenge of his ongoing development (the symptom may go away in time anyway).
Moreover, the child's mind is much more public property than the adult's. What troubles the child is shared with his family, his teachers, and school-chums. That is to say, the child is going through the educational process of acquiring a "personality" (and, alas, neurosis) while the adult has likely forgotten all the trials--at home or outside--that contributed to the later pain or tension bringing him to analysis. Put differently, the adult is troubled but usually can't "remember" the exact sequence of events that are responsible for the trouble. The child often will describe quite readily what is happening about him, but may well not consider himself suffering or in danger-it is his parents or teachers who are concerned. In any event, he has a problem with the future as well as the past, since he must not only be helped to realize how he feels, but helped to grow, to think, feel, and act coherently and sensibly.
The differences between psychoanalysis of children and adults continued to occupy Anna Freud's thoughts in the next decade. In 1929 she gave a remarkable series of lectures to the Hort teachers in Vienna, later published as Psychoanalysis for Teachers and Parents. She was as much concerned with whom she spoke as with what she said. An account of the Hort says that it is ". . . a kind of kindergarten, but particularly for children from six to fourteen years of age. The kindergarten itself takes only children up to six years or until school age. The children who come to the Hort are the children of parents who go out to work. They come daily and return to their parents in the evening. Here, in the Hort, they prepare their school homework, occupy themselves with light work or communal games, and are taken for outings by Hort workers." . . .
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