Abstract
A unique therapeutic condition of residential psychiatric treatment of emotionally disturbed children lies in the transference potential which the institution provides. The child who is separated from his family and from the original partners in conflict re-experiences and re-enacts these conflicts within the institution. As the conflicts emerge in the new setting, the child tends to seek transference figures within the institution with whom to re-enact the old conflicts. He relives the past with this new cast of characters-the staff of the residential treatment center. Intensive study of certain cases within our hospital demonstrates that the recorded events of the daily life of a child in residential treatment can be constructed as a narrative; reading such data carefully, with meticulous attention to detail, reveals the history of the disorder, the major conflictual figures in the illness, and the specific meanings of the child’s pathological behavior and defense. In these respects, the transference behavior of the child toward institutional figures as well as to the psychotherapist provides a diagnostic key to the nature and origins of the emotional disorder as well as the therapeutic instrument for effecting change in the personality through insight and corrective emotional experience. In order to
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