What Sort of a Child's Love?

The author explores the counter-transference bond between adult and child in analytical work. She wonders about the nature of love between a child and an adult, in light of the problem of pedophilic perversion. She develops the hypothesis that descriptions of the transference relationship in child analysis are few and relatively poor because child analysts, for reasons that history makes evident, have remained trapped in a repression of the incest theme. On the basis of the Jungian figure of the quaternio, she shows the inhibitory or blocking effects on the therapeutic process of the sexual theme of incest, when it remains unconscious or insufficiently elaborated by the analyst.