“The Goodest of Functions”: The Restoration of Temporality in the Analysis of a Psychotic Child

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the psychoanalysis of a hospitalized psychotic child that validates some current theoretical understanding about primitive, unrepresented states of mind. It highlights the function of fusion as a symbiotic defense against deadness, following the attack on linkage that destroys temporality. It also demonstrates the facility of the transference in play mode to promote internalization in a child walled off from human contact, and then follows the growth and development that ensued.

KEYWORDS:

• Child psychosis
• fusion
• symbiosis
• deadness
• temporality
• linkage

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frederick L. Meisel

Frederick L. Meisel, MD graduated from Princeton University in 1963 and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1968. He completed residency in Adult, Adolescent and Child Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts Mental Health Center, serving as Chief Resident from 1971-1972. He has supervised and taught in the Psychiatry Departments of Boston’s Children's Hospital and Beth Israel Hospital, and currently teaches at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Additionally, he teaches a Child Analysis clinical case seminar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, where he has been a faculty member since 2005. He has also been on the faculty of Simmons School of Social Work, teaching a course on Child Development, and Tufts School of Medicine, supervising medical students and residents in Child Psychiatry. Currently, he is a Child and Adolescent Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, Senior Psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts.