[Anamnesis in child psychology. Analysis of the technic. Its diagnostic and therapeutic value]

Author wishes to demonstrate that partially not directed interview based on free association of ideas and memories is one of the indispensable parts of exploration for the gathering of exact data in Infantile Psychiatry. Use of another technique, perhaps more "scientific" paradoxically risks leaving to one side and ignoring closest pathogenesis to the first causes of the illness and with it forfaits the possibility of administering a treatment which may consider the etiology of the disorder. To illustrate this postulate, the author chooses the area of precocious infantile anorexia and examines the gathering of data in successive interviews; why the new data are radically changing the initial etiopathogenic hypothesis which are being elaborated in the course of the interviews and why the selected treatment is being modified in a essential way. This technique not only requires an important time investment but a respectful listening altitude on the part of the consultant as well limiting to a minimum his interventions and transmitting a feeling of security to parents and child which makes possible his free remembrance activity and with it, the emergence of pathogenic emotions. On the other hand therapeutic yield in real terms the efficient psychotherapeutic intervention "mutant" as some authors would say, are highest in these moments: "Iron is best shapable when red-hot".