Fantasies in Children Prior to Herniorrhaphy

This paper is devoted primarily to those which involved the attempt of the child psychiatrist to gratify the requests of the pediatric residential staff for "rounds" and psychiatric consultations, as well as the learning opportunities that might be gained there from. The subject matter that we are presenting evolved as an interesting by-product of the child psychiatrist’s attempt to best meet the expressed needs of the pediatricians. During the course of interviewing children, some very interesting material was obtained from several of them preoperatively. It was then decided to obtain further information from other children threatened by a similar operative procedure. By this time the staff people had agreed that they were learning far more about the patient from the recorded interviews than from the subjectively colored reports of the child psychiatrist. While it was regrettable that, for practical reasons, movies could not be combined with the sound, most of the interested participants could picture the child from previous contacts, and were able to observe a great many emotional nuances from the sound recordings. It is our feeling that the method of sound recording as described herein is of particular value in that the pediatrician, pediatric residents, nurses, and workers in ancillary fields are better able to perceive and understand specific defenses-denial, suppression, attempts at mastery and overcontrol, identification with the aggressor, abreaction by repetition and play, etc. It has been our experience that residents exposed to these recordings and learning sessions have continued to look for evidence of similar phenomena in children during their entire residency period. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)