A study of process in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children: the development of a method

Objective: The aim of this article is to present the development of a method of analysis of the process of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children (MAPPP-C) that is relevant for the study of the psychotherapy process from the perspective of the object relations theory. The process was studied by analysing changes in child patients' anxieties, defence mechanisms, object relations and unconscious phantasies, in each psychoanalytic psychotherapy session and throughout their entire psychotherapy. Method: MAPPP-C is both a qualitative and quantitative method of analysis of child psychoanalytic psychotherapy processes. This article will describe the stages in the de-velopment of the method, how the indicators were determined, the units of analysis in the study, the development of analytical codes, the training of raters in this method and inter-rater reliability and agreement tests. Results: This article describes the tasks that compose MAPPP-C, examples of its application and presents some hypotheses that arose from the analysis of the pilot study. Discussion: The preliminary results show that MAPPP-C is a method that allows one to assess the psychotherapist's interventions and the patient's responses in order to enable the analysis of the psychotherapeutic process. The results of the reliability test of the method will allow it to be applied to other types of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with both children and adults.