Question to child therapists: “What do you bring to Jungian thinking?”

Brigitte Allain-Dupré sought to measure the impact of the official recognition of child therapy at the 1983 Jerusalem Congress upon the Jungian world and the clinical approach analysts adopt for their adult patients. Her findings did not make it possible for her to distinguish between an influence specific to child therapists and the influence of research on bonding and the mother-infant relationship, which has profoundly marked psychoanalysis in general in the past twenty-five years. However, on the basis of three examples taken from contemporary Jungian literature, she does strive to show how the need for a developmental metapsychology and the study of individual and early aspects of the life of the patient is arising in Jungian analysts who work with adults.