The Psychoanalytic Situation: Early Analysis and Its Theory of Play Technique

Abstract

We want to home in on Melanie Klein’s 1921 and 1926 years in Berlin and meet a number of her patients, from ages 2 to 17: Fritz, Felix, Lisa, Inge, Egon, and Erna. With these children Klein began to articulate her mode of practice in the young field of early analysis. With confidence in new findings, she advocated for the child’s capacity for self-understanding. In these years the child’s play directed her practice. Klein continued with the theme of intellectual inhibition, adding into its mix a range of contrary presenting problems: fear of authority, pretense of reading and writing, excessive agreeableness, hatred of school, and, from her previous work, early anxiety situations over the loss of the object. If Melanie Klein presents a number of obstacles to the field of education, given the range of symptoms that appeared most significantly in the school context, her Berlin years taught her how children and adolescents present obstacles to psychoanalysis. She had to rethink analytic parameters and create a setting conducive to what Klein came to call “the psychoanalytic situation.” Here, we give flavor to Klein’s slow development of her psychoanalytic theories. We are back in Berlin, though now through Klein’s 1932 book, The Psycho-Analysis of Children and her late 1955a discussion, “The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique: Its History and Significance.” Throughout these twenty-odd years we consider her theory of play and the fate of her views on the conflict between inhibition and the urge for knowledge. Gradually, Klein was developing her theory of anxiety, play, and object relations.