We provide a summary of a recently published study on Psychoanalytic Child Therapy (PaCT; Göttken, White, Klein, von Klitzing, 2014) for young children with emotional and affective symptoms. Consisting of approximately 20 psychotherapy sessions, therapists treat families in parent-child, child-alone, parent-alone settings, aiming to uncover and work through a relational theme underlying the symptoms. Thirty families were entered into a wait-list controlled study in an outpatient setting (n = 18 treatment group; n = 12 waitlist) with the aim of assessing the effectiveness of PaCT (Göttken u. von Klitzing, 2014) for 4- to 10-year-olds with anxiety disorders. After treatment, over half of the children of the treatment group no longer met criteria for anxiety disorder while no children of the control group remitted during the wait-list interval. In addition, parent, child and teacher reports showed significant symptom reduction. The pattern of results lend preliminary support to psychodynamic intervention as an effective tool for treating childhood anxiety and affective disorders and call for future randomized controlled trials to provide additional evidence for these promising effects.
Keywords: anxiety disorders; clinical outcome study; internalizing symptoms; preschool and early school age; psychodynamic child psychotherapy.