The diagnostic assessment of emotionally disturbed children in late latency-early adolescence (9 to 15 years old) requires that the clinician acquire special techniques and background knowledge.

For the most part, it is required that the psychotherapeutic strategy applied to early adolescents be adjusted to take into account certain characteristics of the early-adolescent life-stage. These include, in part, developmentally mandated requirements (e.g., immature thinking processes—thought disorders) and socially defined immaturities (e.g., lack of comprehension of the role of educated professionals in providing expert help in areas of need). Therefore, this chapter is devoted to those psychotherapeutic strategies and techniques derived from information about the psychology of psychotherapy, which set the psychotherapeutic treatment of the early adolescent apart from the treatment protocols used for children of latency age and adults.

To understand the nature of the manifestations of masochism in adolescence, it is necessary that one understand their origins in the previous phases from which they have emerged. The manifestations are masochistic braggadocio, masochistic perversions, adolescent shyness, aspects of prepubescent schizophrenia, incipient masochistic character traits, and the misuse of free association during psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy sessions. The genetic complexes of origin that give structure to the forms of adolescent masochism may be studied through a review of the life phases of masochism.

This chapter is devoted to a description of such tasks and troubles from the point of view of a younger person gazing ageward. It is meant to round out the developmental presentation of this book and to give background within the context of the book for the therapist who needs to know what is on the patient’s mind, though not necessarily in focus and perhaps rejected as unimportant by the unwary child.

The sexual drive undergoes a remarkable degree of maturation and development from birth to about 15 years of age. In the first years of life, drive energies are involved in a search for pleasurable discharge, concentered all in self. In early childhood and latency, drives find outlet through channels dominated by fantasy. At puberty, an organ system specific for the drive matures, providing an outlet channel to conduct libidinal energies toward love objects, which are beyond the limits of the self. Finally, in late adolescence, there is a chance to establish an articulation of the drive and organ system with the needs of the object.

In this chapter, aspects of the development of cognition that are pertinent to psychotherapy during latency will be explored. An attempt will be made to integrate developmental cognitive information into the theories of personality that are used as the basis of psychotherapies for children aged 6 to 12.