[Short-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy in children. Hypothetical model and clinical experiences in late childhood]

This article presents several hypotheses for a conceptual and technical model of short-term psychotherapy applied to a child's emotional problems, which were brought up and discussed at a clinical research workshop at the Institute of Child Neuropsychiatry at the University of Rome. By bringing up the clinical sources the conceptual principals mentioned and the methodology referred to in the principles of short-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy defined by D. Malan (1963, 1976), the study faces the problem of variables and non-variables when adapting short-term methods from the adult to the child. In this perspective of clinical methodology the core of the article faces and discusses specific characteristics of short-term psychotherapy for children, among which: the clinical setting, diagnostic evaluation and the criteria used for selecting those for treatment; the nature of the transfer/counter-transfer relation; the way of interpreting centered on the preferred focus.