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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
There are now numerous archives: The Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine, the Archive of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and The Melanie Klein
Trust, all in London. The papers of Sigmund and Anna Freud are in the archives of the Freud Museum also in London and the Congressional Library in Washington, DC. Many of the documents are online. Should one visit Klein’s archive and have the opportunity to touch the fragile papers to study up close the children’s drawings and to see a world of documentation in handwriting, type, and carbon copy—should one enter these quiet places—then one would have the feeling of being either an intruder into private lives or a gentle friend, respectful of receding time.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Britzman, D.P. (2016). The Psychoanalytic Situation: Early Analysis and Its Theory of Play Technique. In: Melanie Klein. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26085-3_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26085-3_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26083-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26085-3
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)