KINDHEIT

The Viennese psychoanalyst Friedl Früh collects six essays on child analysis in the vein of Freud and Jean Laplanche that were published in different journals over the past years. In this book, Früh places these texts alongside her own largely autobiographical childhood narrative. She thus juxtaposes a literary practice fed by memory, imagination, and language with theoretical analytical models of memory work and biographical constructions—creating a meshwork of reciprocal illumination.

“Young children’s imagination poses riddles we might detect but cannot possibly solve. Even when we interpret children’s drawings or playtime activities, we adults are bound by language—a language that is our home but often not the home of children. We can listen to children—which is different from observing them. [ . . . ] It has been said that dreams of little children are rarely told to us; there are few accounts of early childhood dreams. Why is that? I want to conclude my essay with this question, because it dispatches the ‘why’ as a task for our work with children.” – Friedl Früh

Friedl Früh is a psychoanalyst, training analyst, and child analyst. Born in Mödling near Vienna, she grew up in Upper Austria. She lives and works in Vienna and Schönberg am Kamp. Numerous publications about Sigmund Freud’s theory of drives and the concept of the death drive, phylogenetic imagination, Freud and Karl Abraham, the history of psychoanalysis, and the theories of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche.