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Development toward the latency period: Splitting and the need to forget in
borderline children
Anne Alvarez

To cite this Article Alvarez, Anne(1989) 'Development toward the latency period: Splitting and the need to forget in
borderline children', Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 15: 2, 71 — 83
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00754178908254850
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00754178908254850

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 DEVELOPMENT TOWARD THE LATENCY PERIOD:
SPLITTING AND THE NEED TO FORGET IN BORDERLINE
CHILDREN*
ANNE AL VAREZ, London

The Latency Period and Latency Era Tasks

There is a paper by Kanter in the InternationalReview of Psychoanahsk (1984)
in which he points out that, with the increasing emphasis on the out-patient
treatment and the rehabilitiation of the schizophrenic patient, the concept of
‘‘resocialization” is frequently utilized, but rarely defined or clarified. Perhaps,
he suggests, this is the result of the lack of dialogue between the field of
psychoanalysis and psychiatric rehabilitation. His paper attempts to bridge
that gap, examining the unfolding intra-psychic and intra-personal processes
taking place in adult chronic schizophrenics on a day unit. Its perspective is
psychoanalytic but also insistently developmental, and it focusses on the
deficits in the patients’ personality, deficits which arise from “inadequate
negotiation of latency era tasks, especially as regards ego skills in relation
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to the extra famiIial social environment”. The patients were getting individual
psychoanalytic therapy and some drug treatment, too, but Kanter suggests
that they particularly needed also the latency-type experiences that were pro-
vided for them in the non-interpretive setting of the day unit. In fact, he sug-
gests that the dyadic nature of individual psychotherapy naturally lends itself
to a reworking of emotionally intense parent/child dramas from the pre-
Oedipal, Oedipal and adolescent periods: he maintains that this may
underestimate the importance of the relative calm of latency development,
which he says largely transpires apart from the family (1984).
I myself am not so certain that the dydic nature of individual psychotherapy
need lend itself only to a reworking of emotionally intense parentchild dramas.
The work with psychotic, hyperactive, borderline and psychopathic children
should teach the therapist, in fact, to be especially attuned to moments of
calm between storms and moments of reflection between actions - also,
folowing Segal(l981) and Winnicott (1958), moments of development toward
symbolic thinking, and thanks to Bion, moments where an unthinkable thought
becomes a thinkable one (1962). In short, the lessons to be learned from
Kanter’s insistence on the schizophrenic’s need to negotiate latency era tasks
may be just as relevant to the work of the psycho-analytical therapist as for
the type of day unit and group experience he has in mind. Kanter does point
out that the renegotiation of this erd’s tasks in psychoanalytic treatment has
been somewhat neglected by psychoanalytic clinicians and theorists, except,
he says, in one paper by Hanna Segal, who commented that a very regressed,

* This paper was first given at the ACP Study Weekend, March 1989.

71
 very infantile schizophrenic patient of hers, as he progressed in treatment well
enough to be able to leave hospital, behaved at home very much like a child
in the latency period (1950).
I do not pretend to know the reason for this relative neglect, but one reason
may lie in the very definition of and concept of the latency period itself, which
tends to make it sound a rather uninteresting, unexciting period. Here is the
definition provided by La Planche and Pontalis in their Dictionary of
Psychoanalysis :
“Latency period is the period which extends from the dissolution of infantile
sexuality at the age of five or six to the onset of puberty, constituting a pause
in the evolution of sexuality. This stage sees a decrease in sexual activity, the
desexualization of object relationships and of the emotions, particularly the
predominance of tenderness over sexual desire and the emergence of such feel-
ings as shame and disgust along with moral and aesthetic aspirations. According
to psychoanalytic theory, the latency period has its origin in the dissolution
of the Oedipus complex. It represents an intensification of repression, which
brings about an amnesia affecting the earliest years, a transformation of object
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cathexis into identification with the parents and a development of sublimation”

(1973).
Laplanche and Pontalis (ibid.) state that at some points Freud described
the latency period as a predetermined hiatus between two surges of libidinal
pressure, at others, e.g. in the Three Essays in 1905, he saw the sexual urges,
not as diminishing in strength, but as simply diverting into sublimations with
no quantitative decrease. Later, in 1926, he said that the sexual urges do
diminish in strength but, of course, he also accounted for the latency period
in terms of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, so, as Laplanche and
Pontalis point out, there is also a very powerfully argued psychological ex-
planation for latency as well. Yet this notion of hiatus, or of repression, in
fact the very concept of “latency” itself, does tend to imply that what is really
of importance is that which is latent and hidden, not the poor, thin, super-
ficial stuff which remains on the surface. Both hiatus and repression or
sublimation refer to what is not visible rather than that which is. Further-
more, La Planche and Pontalis indicate, interestingly, that Freud speaks only
of a period of latency, not of a stage. “There is strictly speaking no new
Organization o f sexuality”; they point out that the notion of organization of
libido implies coordination of component instincts with the primacy of one
erotogenic zone after another, oral followed by anal and later the genital zone,
for example. But later on in Freud’s theory, the notion of an organization
also implies the organizing power of the object, particularly at the genital stage
of psychosexual development. In my view it is possible to consider that there
may indeed be a relatively new organization at latency, but we may need the
theories of Klein, %gal and Bion to examine what kind of object such organiza-
tion might be created around. Is it only sekuality which is being organized?

72
 Technical Implications
Melanie Klein discussed the problems of technique with latency children in
her 1932 book, The Psychoanalysis of Children: she suggested that some
modifications in adult technique and in her play technique with little children
were necessary. She said that latency children neither had the insight into their
illness nor the desire to be cured characteristic of the adult patient, nor were
they under the immediate and powerful influence of instinctual experiences
and fantasies in the way the small child is, “who puts these things in front
of us straight away”. She pointed out that children in the latency period have
a limited imaginative life in accordance with a strong “tendency to repres-
sion”, which is characteristic of their age. She wrote: “Added to this is the
general attitude of reserve and distrust so typical of this period of life, an
attitude which is in part an outcome of their intense preoccupation with the
struggle against masturbation and thus makes them deeply averse to anything
that savours of search and interrogation or touches on the impulses they just
manage to keep under control”. I confess that that sounds much more to me
like a description of a borderline paranoid, or severely neurotic, latency child
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than a healthy latency child. However, it requires Klein’s later concept of the
depressive position and Segal on symbol formation to delineate the differences.
This is a fairly early work of Klein’s.
Klein points out that, whereas it is appropriate to interpret the small child’s
sexual fantasies, even in the first sessions, things are different with the laten-
cy child, who has already “desexualised those experiences and fantasies much
more completely and works them over in a different form”. Again I suggest
we need the later theories in order to examine the full implication of the no-
tion of “working over in a different form”. At any rate, Klein goes on to
talk about the use of drawings, dramatization and generally seems to recom-
mend a somewhat more tentative and patient approach to interpretation. She
does show, however, how much the eventual interpretation of sexual preoc-
cupations does bring relief and increased freedom to these severely inhibited
and sometimes quite withdrawn children she is treating. She insists that what
looks like pure resistance without any fantasy content - for example,
monotonous obsessional drawing, building, making things with few associa-
tions - can be treated as true material if we pay close attention to infinitesimal-
ly small indications in the material. She insists that it will not be necessary
to attempt to liberate or free the child by things like encouragement or by
the giving of advice. His own fantasies will liberate himself once they are drawn
attention to.
My own view is that as far as the inhibited neurotic child is concerned, that
paper of Mrs Klein’s, even though it precedes her theory of the depressive
position, does still stand as pretty well the last word. I think, however, with
the borderline child, who may have a much weaker ego and a super-ego which
is not repressive and inhibiting, but is possibly dangerously corrupting, col-
lusive or over-stimulating, the technical situation is very different and we do

73
 need the later theory to inform our technique with them. Some material from
a neurotic patient may illustrate Klein’s point first: A previously very inhibited
neurotic boy patient of mine, named Terry, aged 11, came in one day with
a photograph of a racing car of a type he particularly admired. He rhapsodised
on its sleek shape and its smoothness of design and its speed; he was very
much inviting, almost insisting, but certainly hoping, that I would admire it
as much as he did. He insisted on shoving the picture under my nose, and
could not believe that I could do anything but be stunned by this wonderful
car. When I interpreted this, in what I think was not a wounding way, but
in a manner which was respectful of his expectant confidence but which also
took account of the phallic symbolism and his phallic ambitions, he literally
leaped off the cupboard onto the couch. He leaped up before he went down,
and I thought he was feeling a mixture of embarrassment and elation, and
that this leap was half a flight away from the interpretation and half a dive
up and into his object, a sort of astonished but elated confirmation. And I
think it really did reveal that liberating effect that Mrs Klein describes. I should
add that the question of how often one interprets such symbolic content even
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to a fairly well latency child with a strong ego is another matter, but it is not
for discussion here. I shall only say that I think the implications of Bion’s
ideas about how thoughts become thinkable are relevant to work with neurotic
patients, too. The power of symbolism can be weakened and killed off as much
by pseudo-analytic repetitive over-interpretation of part-object material as
much as by timid under-interpretation.
But to return to the question of borderlines: I want to mention again the
schizophrenic patient of Hanna Segal, described in her 1950 paper, who be-
haved like a latency child when he returned home from the psychiatric hospital.
Segal suggests that there was an interesting shift at that time in her patient’s
failure to symbolize:
“At the beginning of treatment, the symbol and the things symbolized were
equated. Now the unconscious equation remained unchanged, but consciously
the symbolism had to be completely denied. A cigarette was a cigarette and
he would not accept that it might stand for a penis, for, if he accepted that,
it would mean that he was actually sucking and biting a penis, which would
be madness. In effect, nearly every fantasy had to be totally denied.”
Now this is a not uncommon experience with psychotic patients who are im-
proving and it is also not an uncommon experience with borderline patients
who seem to be trying to ward off a complete psychotic breakdown. Such
patients do seem to have to be excessively defended against fantasy and sym-
bol in such a way that one has to begin to question the ways in which we
use and perhaps should not use the notion of defence. Margaret Hunter (1986)
has written about a little sexually abused girl who came from a family of child
prostitutes. She was the youngest of the three. She was a child who said things
like “I belong in the gutter”, but gradually, over a long period of intensive

74
 help, she did get out of the gutter. One day she told her. therapist that she
was going to put her tadpoles into the pond in order that they should make
some babies. The therapist asked how, and she said: “Well, they go there
with their mate”, and the therapist started to interpret the sexual content and
the sexual fantasy, and the child said: “Oh no, they just go there with their
friend and then the babies come”. She was using the Cockney word for friend.
It seems to me that the child had achieved a very important development in
that she was able to conceive that friendship and friendliness might have
something to do with making babies. This would appear to be a remarkable
development in a child subjected to such-a degree of sexual abuse, where every
human encounter, even possibly the loving decent ones - the parents who
abuse children aren’t always vicious and brutal, they are often very, very in-
fantile and immature, but also kind and affectionate - is sexualized. Such
a child might need the fog to clear and learn to be able toforget about physical
intimacy and sexuality, to be able to consider pleasurable, friendly experiences
that seem to be free of such connotations.
The psychoanalytic theory of sublimation suggests that such experiences
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are never completely free of sexual and pre-genital connotations, but other
psychoanalytic theories, namely those which examine the development from
symbolic equation through to symbol formation, and those which explore the
processes of growth through which thoughts become thinkable and fantasies
become genuinely modified into other fantasies, may provide a very different
perspective: I would suggest that a somewhat neglected implication of these
theories may be that powerful splitting and repressive forces acting against
more primitive connotations, may at certain moments be essential for this
growth to take place. I am thinking here of splitting, not in its purely defen-
sive function, but in its, to borrow a word from Winnicott, facilitative func-
tion or, to borrow a similar word from Shapiro and Perry, (who wrote about
the biological changes in latency), its enabling function (1976). Concentra-
tion on a thought, a task or a subject requires focussing of attention, but it
also requires the capacity to ignore other thoughts, tasks and subjects, the
capacity to put aside those others. It also seems to require the willingness of
thoughts, tasks, subjects, to remain in the background and wait their turn,
so it is also a certain sort of object-relation with one’s own thoughts. Such
splitting has an important developmental function, which is by no means purely
defensive.
The difficulty is, one’s experience in the consulting room with patient’s like
Segal’s case does make one feel their reaction is terribly defensive, it feels
defensive. But, of course, if a farmer encloses a field so that his “sheep may
safely graze”, the hungry wolves outside may see the fence as defensive; the
sheep also, may feel - in their anxious moments - that the fence is for their
defence. But in their safer moments, they may feel protected by it so that
the flock may graze peacefully and flourish.
These considerations may seem perfectly self-evident but they may

75
 nonetheless determine whether the therapist stresses defensive functions and
insists on reminding the patient of the unconscious symbolic significance of
cigarettes and mates, that is of fantasy, or whether he understands the patient’s
attempt to forget about, to be forgetful of, an overpowering sexual preoc-
cupation. And I think we do need the theories of Segal and Bion to under-
stand these attempts to forget. Bion himself has written of the lack of resonance
in the flat communications of schizophrenics, and Rosenfeld has remarked
on the great strain psychotics labour under in their struggle to climb out of
psychosis, and how impoverished the consequent sane material can be made
by the efforts to keep out the madness (1981). But the technical question, and
I believe it is very coloured by theoretical questions, is how we are to under-
stand and interpret these efforts to keep out the madness. Should we push
for integration or should we consider that adequate splitting always has to
precede integration - and that adequate splitting surely implies full develop-
ment of whatever is on each side of the split? Premature integrations may,
I believe, simply lead to confusion. Adequate splitting, then, may need, at
times, to be preceded by adequate splitting off. Are there short cuts to achiev-
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ing a speech and language which is full of vitality, fantasy and resonance,
or does sexual material need to be lit up by other meanings? Will reminding
the smoker that his cigarette symbolizes a penis or telling the little girl that
her mates are really sexual couples increase resonance or will it flood the pa-
tient with an all too narrow set of meanings? I believe that for some neurotic
children it may increase resonance and integration, and for some borderline
children it may obstruct development of what Bion calls alpha function.
Here I think it is useful to return to Hanna Segal’s classic distinction be-
tween a symbolic equation and a symbol in her paper, “Notes on Symbol
Formation ”. Segal stresses that in the symbolic equation the symbol substitute
is felt to be the original object. One of her schizophrenic patients explained
he no longer played the violin because he couldn’t be expected to masturbate
in public. She writes: “The substitute’s own properties, that is its violinness,
are not recognised or admitted. The symbolic equation is used to deny the
absence of the ideal object or to control a persecutory one. It belongs to the
earliest stages of development.” And then she goes on: “The symbol proper,
on the other hand, is felt to represent the object”, and again she says, “Its
own characteristics (that is, the object’s) are recognized, respected and used.
It arises when depressive feelings predominate over the paranoid-schizoid ones,
when separation from the object, ambivalent guilt and loss can be experienced
and tolerated. The symbol is used not to deny but to overcome loss. ” To my
mind, this distinction between denial and overcoming is the most fundamen-
tal meta-theoretical contribution of the whole Kleinian oeuvre, and its im-
plications for technique are huge. When, for example should a piece of split-
ting off be regarded as a defence and when should it be regarded as the begin-
nings of an attempt to emerge from being overwhelmed by an iller state of
mind, and therefore as the first step in overcoming something?

76
 One way of looking at this distinction is to consider that the schizophrenic
patient in the case of a symbolic equation is so struck by the similarities, the
equation between the penis and the violin, between masturbating and playing
the music that all differences are denied or destroyed. In the case of a real
symbol, note that Segal stresses separation from the object and the fact that
the symbol’s own characteristics are recognised, in other words, in the case
of a real symbol, differences are recognised and respected. In the fully
developed symbol and in all great art, where real resonance is allowed to take
place, there seems to be both the poignancy of loss together with the beauty
and pleasure of discovery and rediscovery, of regaining touch with the original
object, in however modified a form. So this violin may have for the non-
psychotic person a multitude of associations and meanings, mostly musical.
It is the presence of those many meanings in the one image which provides
the richness, the ambiguity, and increases the development of symbolic think-
ing. I would suggest, therefore, that in the borderline patient, who may be
struggling not to defend himself against sexual fantasies but to protect the
emergence and development of other meanings, we need to beware of the risk
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of forcing him back into the use of a symbolic equation, when he may ’be
just taking the first step on the way to a transitional object, which might one
day become a true and resonant symbol. This is the process which I believe
cannot be rushed and should not be rushed by the forcing of premature
integrations.

Further Reflections on the Nature of the Latency Period

It is important to note, before examining some clinical material, that at least
three American theorists and authors have tackled the latency period in quite
interesting ways. All of these three have in common with Kanter a stress on
the developmental progress element in the latency period which contrasts with
the notion of hiatus andxepression in Freud and in the earlier Melanie Klein.
The most recent of these is Shapiro and Perry, and tney wrote a very interesting
article called “Latency Revisited, the Age of Seven Plus or Minus One’,
published in 1985. They point out that society has always seemed to know
empirically when to begin its push on the child towards a greater autonomy.
During the Middle Ages children were sent away from home to become pages
at seven. The Roman Church considers the age of seven the age of reason,
in that only then can the child differentiate between the bread of everyday
life and the Host. School age in the United States begins at seven and in the
Soviet Union at age six. (Italians are totally shocked at the fact that we British
send little four-year olds off to spend a whole day at school.) Shapiro and
Perry suggest that current research indicates that there are biological reasons
for the choice of age 7, in that there is a striking correspondence of timetable
in brain anatomy, brain physiology and brain chemistry, and these corres-
pond with measurable changes at perceptual and cognitive level (1976). Their
American Freudian stress on the child’s desire for mastery, however, takes

77
 no account of the way a child with some degree of depressive position develop-
ment might approach the acquisition of skills. The child learning to field a
catch in a cricket match may certainly want to beat the opposition, but his
more depressive position desires for grace, excellence, style, may also inform
the improvements in his skill. Identification with an admired hero will often
‘play a part in these developments, too.
Erikson, writing in 1950, called the latency period the era of industry; he
stressed the positive steps in ego formation, rather than the repression of sex-
uality. He suggested that the child’s desire to “bring a productive situation
to completion is an aim which gradually supersedes the whims and wishes
of play”. . . . “His ego boundaries include his tools and skills. The work prin-
ciple teaches him the pleasure of work completion by steady attention and
persevering diligence”. Erikson wrote Childhood and Society in 1950, and
Harry Stack Sullivan termed the latency period, “the juvenile era”, in 1940.
He is the greatest of the theorists of Inter-personal Psychoanalysis in America,
and Greenberg and Mitchell have claimed that he is very misunderstood and
frequently misread. They point out that his work had enormous influence on
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modern American psychiatry and contemporary psychoanalysis. He, like other

interpersonal theorists, was convinced that classical Freudian drive theory pro-
vided an inadequate foundation for theory and practice. However, Greenberg
and Mitchell insist he was not simply a superficial culturist by any means.
Sullivan, in discussing latency, focusses on the inter-personal shift from rela-
tionships within the family to peer relations and to relationships with teachers.
He writes very interestingly about how the child learns, through social and
educational pressure, to extinguish the autistic from the expressed thought,
learning what can be expressed and how it can be expressed. This is very
reminiscent of the problems faced by psychotic children who are beginning
to improve. Sullivan is also very interesting on how the self system -he calls
it the self system, but perhaps a Kleinian would often call it the internal ob-
ject - is able to control focal awareness, so that more infantile ways of re-
acting and thinking can be selectively ignored, while other more mature
methods be concentrated on. He writes of the internal supervisory pattern
- again they sound like internal objects to me -which monitor this, so that,
he says, “your hearer sees that your grammar is stuck together, so that you
can put thoughts together into some semblance of the English language. Your
spectator notices when something isn’t quite cricket or is too revealing or it
adds fog or camouflage to make up for a careless breach”, and he adds that
“your internal reader checks your prose”. Thus Sullivan and Erikson seem
to me to redress the balance somewhat in the direction of seeing latency as
a period of development, but I think both of them lose the continuity which
would be provided by infant observation and all the new experimental infant
development research. There is plenty of evidence that babies work their minds
quite hard from birth (Wolff, 1974) and that they begin to learn to hold one
thought at bay while concentrating on another, also from the very beginning.

78
 (See Bruner on “placeholding” and “learning to think in parentheses”, 1968).
In other words, some form of splitting off of one activity or perception seems
often absolutely essential for other activities or perceptions to develop and
mature.
I want to return to La Planche and Pontalis’ insistence that for Freud there
is no new orgunizution of sexuality in the latency period. I would like to sug-
gest that the theories of Bion do imply a new organization; that, if the organiza-
tion is organised around changing relations to an object and if Bion is right
that the baby not only loves and hates his objects, but wishes to know them
and wishes to know not only the contents of the mother’s body but th? con-
tents of the mother’s mind, then the latency child may have quite a different
object around which to organise its feelings. It is, as mentioned earlier, a pity
that Erikson’s and Sullivan’s stress on industriousness and the intellectual and
social functions of latency leaves out the pre-history, whereas Bion dates the
mind’s need for mental nourishment right from the beginning of life. I would
also suggest that his concept of alpha function, the function of the mind that
he says permits the mind to think its thoughts and which endows experience
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with meaning, is another element in his theory which treats mental develop-
ment and thinking as processes going ahead in their own right, not purely
as defensive against more “fundamental” fantasies. Kanter insists that, when
the schizophrenic from his day unit begins to have fantasies and shares fan-
tasies with other people on the ward, even fantasies of the sick joke type,
this is a considerable step beyond hallucination. This seems not so far removed
from Bion’s idea of the process by which a beta element (an unthinkable
thought or an unthought thought) can become transformed into material
suitable for dreaming or thinking.

Clinical Examples and Further Thoughts on Technique

I suspect there are many technical implications, too numerous to mention,
following from the considerations discussed above. It is important, for
example, to consider, with a borderline child making an attempt to negotiate
latency era tasks, whether our interpretations of the baby part or, say, of his
oral fantasies, is liberating of his infantile part, or whether such interpreta-
tions only succeed in infantilizing an already immature child. There is a very
moving sequence in the story of Jonathan Bradley’s treatment of a sexually
abused and quite corrupted little boy, Omiros. He describes the day when
Omiros was trying to talk about a bun that he had brought in and the word
“bum” kept getting in the way. He got more and more tearful and seemed
very relieved when his therapist understood what an effort he was making
to keep the perverted considerations out and to let a “bun” remain a “bun”.
Another patient, a borderline girl, Adele, treated by Dr Gemello, was refer-
red at the age of 3 or 4 and thought to be probably retarded and possibly
brain-damaged. Adele seemed quite incapable of learning, drank water all
day long and urinated everywhere, masturbated all the time, and presented

79
 as a very mindless, ugly, empty, grotesque child at that stage. She has had
about 8 years’ treatment - and it is worth remembering that Kanter says it
takes 8 years to negotiate latency. (Perhaps when we take these psychotics
and borderlines on, we really do need to think in terms of 8 to 10 years at
least.) Anyway, this girl now is 13, and she is very much changed. She dresses
attractively, she is still behind at school, but she is now very much educable.
She is socially much more normal, but still quite immature. She is in touch
with her wish to please her object and this in more age-appropriate ways. When
her therapist had a baby, about 3 years ago, it was quite tricky for the therapist
to know when to interpret the powerful infantile feelings which were aroused
by this experience and when to interpret her infantilization of herself, and
her conviction that being a baby was the only way to win her therapist’s love.
These distinctions have helped Adele to mature and, recently she has made
considerable efforts not to be so sexually intrusive. She was very proud recently
of the fact that, when she had her period and went to school, she managed
not to ask the teacher whether she was having her period, too! It is, of course,
a pity when puberty arrives just at the moment when the child has barely gone
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into psychological latency. Nevertheless, this type of achievement, the effort

to check this kind of sexual intrusiveness and curiosity, is not an idle or purely
superficial development; it indicates some recognition by a previously totally
out of touch, brutal and brutalized child that other people have feelings about
her intrusiveness and dislike it.
Paul Barrows has been treating a borderline psychotic patient named John.
He lives in a children’s home. He may have been sexually abused by his
brother, but anyway is very violent himself, so much so that, when he was
fostered, he had to be sent back to the children’s home. The school is finding
it very, very difficult to hold on to him. He talks to Paul about the “evil
blighter” side of himself, but almost all of his communications are delivered
in a very dead, detached voice. He also has some very strange clang associa-
tions, a “hole” can become a “halo”, and the halo can become “holy”. A
few months into treatment, his weekly session began with him talking about
God brainwashing and imprisoning the devil, and speaking as though he really
thought he himself was this cruel God. The therapist’s notes continue:
“Later on, he took an old drawing from his box and told me that, if I wanted
to carry on filling it in later, then I could do so, that I was ’free as a bird’,
an expression that he used several times. He went on to explain to me that it
was a metaphor and that a metaphor meant that, a person didn’t really mean
what he wassaying (Author’s italics). He was trying to define a metaphor: he
gave the example that, if I were to hit him, he would say: ‘You’llbe dead for
that’, but he wouldn’t actually mean that he would stab me. I said that I thought
perhaps he did feel like stabbing me, but that also he might feel it but wouldn’t
necessarily do it. Also I said that feeling it didn’t necessarily make him into
a horrid person as he seemed to think . . . A little later on, he talked of how
he would fight his enemies at school - he gets into a lot of very vicious fights

80
 at school. I got the impression that, if somebody came along, he would feel
frightened of them, and then he, would fight them. They would be angry, he
would say to them: ‘You can’t take a joke’ and they would then go off.”
It is in particular the notion of metaphor and the idea of the others who
“could not take a joke” to which I want to draw attention. I think it would
be quite important with material like that to interpret not the patient’s wish
to stab you (not that Paul did), but the patient’s fear that he will and, fur-
thermore, his fear that not only he but his object, too, doesn’t know the dif-
ference between a thought and an action. It seems to me that this boy had
a problem with his own violence, certainly, but even more of a prob1e.n with
his object’s violence. He had said that his enemies couldn’t take a joke. He
is, I believe, searching desperately for an object that can contain and transform
violent action into violent metaphor. Interpretations of an uncovering unmask-
ing type (which fortunately Paul Barrows did not make) which insisted on
revealing John’s violence to himself, would, I believe, have been heard by
him as an amplification and escalation and accusation, rather than as a recep-
tive containment of his wish to scale down his violent object relations. In
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another session he again was preoccupied with the problem of how to con-
tain destructiveness and where to put it. He drew a map of Bristol, which
was full of boundaries, which he then decided were too thin. He went over
them and changed them to borders, which “would be much thicker’’ and in-
deed he made them much thicker, paticularly the one between Avon and
Gloucestershire. This was because “in Gloucestershire crazy things happened.
For example, three seconds could be ten minutes. People drove on the wrong
side of the road. The bridge between Avon and Gloucestershire opens and
closes very very fast.”
Again, we seem to see a boy trying to strengthen the barrier which keeps
the crazy things out because he feels that they can come in and out with amaz-
ing unregulated rapidity. The technical question of how one balances inter-
pretations referring to both sides of the border seems to me to revolve around
what Anna Freud would call the degree of structuralization of the ego (Sandler
and Freud 1985) and what Kleinians would consider to include ego strength
and also the strength and sanity of the internal object. These questions might
also revolve around what Bion would consider to be the object’s willingness
to contain and transform communications on a truly symbolic level. If the
patient’s symbol-forming function and alpha function is very weak, and in
addition, if these functions are equally weak in his internal object, it may be
important for the therapist not to make interpretations which encourage sym-
bolic equations, but rather interpretations that enable vital longed-for distinc-
tions to be made. Then, maybe, real symbolic development may begin to take
place, and the tasks appropriate to the latency era may be undertaken.
In conclusion, I would suggest that it is important to think of the latency
period, not only as a period of hiatus and repression, but also as a period
of very important development. The notion of hiatus or repression, of defences

81
 against sexuality, may be useful for understanding the problems of the neurotic
latency child, but not for the healthy latency child nor for the borderline
psychotic latency child. The healthy child with some degree of depressive posi-
tion development may have achieved adequate symbol formation for his sex-
uality, or, in Bion’s terms, learned techniques for the modification of frustra-
tion and anxiety, rather than techniques leading to evasion of frustration. The
problem for the borderline psychotic child is that he may be so stuck in sym-
bolic equations that he cannot manage techniques which arrive anywhere near
defences or evasions. His first attempts to erect barriers and borders against
madness may need to be respected, not demolished.

Postscript
I am grateful to discussants and panellists at the ACP Study Weekend (March
1989), for pointing out that Anna Freud and her followers did view the laten-
cy period as a period of development - development in object relations, in
the ego, and in the superego, and also for the suggestion that the fate of
destructiveness and aggression during latency should be distinguished from
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discussions on the fate of sexuality.

On the theme of normal latency, the importance was stressed of the laten-
cy child’s need to establish friendly peer relations outside the home, as an
aid to relinquishing his oedipal ties, and the corresponding need for parental
objects to permit the child to have a life of his own outside the home. The
implications for technique here are interesting: when do we see material about
a new friend as a defensive or disloyal “turning away” from the primary ob-
ject, and when do we see it as a developmental step forward, carrying good
introjections and healthy implications? Such considerations would seem to
involve difficult but important distinctions.
45 Flask Walk
London NW3

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