The Early Education of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

To approach the development of Melanie Klein’s theories of the child’s inner world, we look into the early years between 1900 and 1919 and ask, what was the beginning of psychoanalysis like? What preoccupations, conceptual turns, obstacles, and presenting problems created the psychoanalytic imagination? And why build the mind upon the soft foundations of childhood’s phantasy of sexuality? Our questions already place us into the folds of Klein’s technique of psychoanalysis. Her evolving work too is a theory of perennial beginnings and retroactive relays, formative of both the dynamics of precocious mental life and the psychoanalytic working over of its images. We continue to ask how Klein came to picture the child’s emotional world. For now, we can note that psychoanalytic beginnings join a mode of therapeutics to the arts of interpretation, and its clinical techniques and conceptual frames are instructed by the flora and fauna of psychical life. Around 1918 Klein attended the Fifth International Psychoanalytic Congress, held in Budapest. She heard Freud read his paper, “Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy.” The movement was barely 18 years old. Of particular interest, and however incomplete the theory, the work of psychoanalysis already contained for Freud its elemental goals that emerge from their obstacles:

To bring to the patient’s knowledge the unconscious, repressed impulses existing in him, and, for that purpose, to uncover the resistances that oppose this extension of his knowledge about himself…. Our hope is to achieve this by exploiting the patient’s transference to the person of the physician, so as to induce him to adopt our conviction of the inexpediency of the repressive process established in childhood and of the impossibility of conducting life on the pleasure principle. (Freud 1919, p. 159)

We find in Freud’s optimistic statement the key vocabulary that emerges from obstacles in the mind. Mrs. Klein will stretch Freud’s ideas on adult analysis into the young field of child psychoanalysis and then loop back her views to think anew on the work of adult analysis.