The word communication is used in a very special sense to describe a technique exployed in a certain kind of treatment of deeply disturbed children, in a residential setting.Communicationwithis distinguished from interpretationtoa child, because while interpretation bringslatentcontent to the surface, communication, while concerned with latent content, is carried out in terms ofmanifestcontent.Such communication can be established between a child and the therapist. It is most likely to appear following the formation of a primary bond.It is practical for one therapist to maintain several such lines of communication at the same time. This is therefore an emotionally economic technique.The fact that the therapist can respond to the child at once, in context, and with feeling, provides just the kind of adaption to needs that a very disturbed child needs at a certain stage of treatment.The therapist can continue to maintain such a contact without too much strain—each child having his own highly individual life‐line which he will be inclined to hold very firmly.Mistakes—inevitable in every kind of treatment—are not disastrous once contact is established. Before this point is no communication in the special sense, and after this point the child will correct mistakes.Mothers and certain gifted people have such means of making contact with the inner world of young children; such intuitive skill tends to be lost as the child grows up and inside and outside becomes more firmly established.The therapist, like the mother, must be able to tolerate the eventual loss of the life‐line when it is no longer needed. Some children will have a whole system of communication, others may have moments of contact which are just as important.Story‐tellers and dreamers have been making communicaitons since the beginning of history. We are often concerned with the interpretation of these myths of poems, or whatever we choose to call them. Perhaps there are times when we should simply respond to them as communications.Progress is made from pre‐integration to integration. (For example: Jane, who had been a frozen delinquent, read the fairy‐tale in which, in order to gain a soul, a fairy must sacrifice her immortality, and in recounting this story Jane said “You know, this is what has happened to me.” Because she now knew of a to‐morrow and a yesterday she knew also that she was born and would die—she had lost the “immortality” of the psychopath who lived entirely in “today”)Interpretation seems to belong to transference and probably regression towards disintegration; communication belongs to a primary bond and pro