Wildest dreams: Aspiration,identification, and symbol-formation in depressed children

This paper explores some technical and theoretical implications of psychotherapy with deprived and severely depressed children. Phantasies about the future, and dreams of nobility, are seen to play a vitalising part in normal development. Grandiose lies may be similar to, but far more tentative and communicative than, the declarative communications of the manic child. The phantasies may sometimes need to emerge first in the mind of the therapist through a process which may be termed ‘anticipatory identification’. The need for a grammar of such communicative identification processes is discussed; so also are implications for processes of symbol-formation.