AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO CHILD PSYCHOTHERAPY By Margaret Lowenfeld.
Read at a meeting of The Medical Section of the British Psychological Society on 22nd March, 1950.
The work of preparation of this paper has been made very much easier by two events. The first is the presidential address by our chairman and the second, two papers by Dr. Rickman which have recently appeared in the B.M.J. and the Journal of Mental Science.
In his address, Dr. Dicks put to us that we should take as our goal in psychotherapy, the concept of integration, and he called for the development of new techniques for the study of human nature, particularly in its social aspects. Dr. Rickman has given us an account of the origin and development of psycho-analysis which serves as a framework against the background of which other work can be pin-pointed. Both make my task of today very much easier.
Now in one section of his paper, Dr. Rickman writes as follows: ‘The unconscious seems to be almost exclusively occupied with human relationships’, and in his paper he describes the development of a technique of investigation and therapy whose instruments of work are free association and the development of a particular form of human relationship. In his paper in the Journal of Mental Science, he expands this into two elements, ‘verbal interchange between patient and doctor in which the phenomena presented
by the patient to the doctor during interview are interpreted by the doctor to the patient’ and ‘a procedure in which transference phenomena are
manipulated by the doctor’.