Children of the Clinic, Children’s Clinical Care

The pioneers of psychoanalysis who used the cases of their own children or adolescents close to them did no great service to the cause of child psychoanalysis. Freud, Jung, Abraham, and the others sought to verify the coherency between the material they were gathering in sessions with adults and what they were able to understand and interpret of their children’s experience. This material, however, promoted an endogamic relationship between the founders of psychoanalysis. If we are aware of the traces of this endogamy in the practice of child analysis, it is easier for us to detect the cumbersome incestuous history of its origins.