The Hitchcok boy: treating aggressive acting out in child therapy

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited."P, a seven-year-old boy, derived significant benefit from a three year psychoanalytic psychotherapy. This clinical case, illustrate communication barriers that develop and establish themselves in the context of psychosis. Throughout the analytical process, the psychotherapist was consistently faced with a relational paradox: she had before her a child exhibiting chaotic psychic functioning, always on the verge of disintegration, and further characterised by a strong desertification of ludic expression. In considering the psychoanalytic trajectory, the current article examines the manifest relational communication aiming at a permanent attack on the therapeutic attachment, therefore intensifying the analyst’s creative suspense.