What is a child? For Freud, the child was never a category or concept of any theoretical value. Instead he proposed the notion of the infantile as a time outside of history. Thus there are different notions of time and history at play in the psychoanalysis of a child, as well as in the history of the field itself. In clinical practice, in society, and in law, however, childhood is defined in reference to age and development.

Within psychoanalysis there has been a confusion of childhood as construed through the retrospective memories of adults, with the child who is observed and...