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In psychoanalytical psychotherapy with adults the gravity of childhood experience still weighs perhaps too heavily on present day conceptions dating back to the beginning of child psychoanalysis in the fifties. New techniques in interpretation and recent experimental findings in early child-mother relations show that links between the past and the present may be reconsidered, however indirect they be. Indeed, when the past emerges it is transfigured, crops up in bits and pieces and altered beyond recognition.