Narratives of the Psychoanalytic Situation: On the Friendship of Mrs. K. and Richard

Abstract

Just at the start of the Freud-Klein Controversies, in the midst of World War II, Mrs. Klein, then 59 conducted a 4-month analysis with Richard, a 10 year-old boy. The year was 1941. Due to the Blitzkrieg in London, the analysis took place in a small rented playroom in Wales. They met for 93 sessions. As was her practice, after each session in her peculiar shorthand, Mrs. Klein listed the urgent affects, Richard’s preoccupations, and outlined her interpretations. At the age of 79 Klein returned to her notes to craft her most affecting narrative. She added extensive footnotes dedicated to her readers that serve as Greek Chorus. While many of them anticipated arguments against her style of interpretation, she also gave clinical advice on analytic comportment and continued to justify her psychoanalytic technique even during times when she broke her own rules. Narrative of a Child Analysis: The Conduct of the Psycho-Analysis of Children as Seen in the Treatment Of a Ten-Year-Old Boy was published posthumously. Whereas her 1932 study, The Psycho-Analysis of Children presented early analysis through rapid brushstrokes and grand theoretical leaps, The Narrative unfolds time and meticulously reconstructs story with literary devises such as use of first and third person voice, foreshadowing, suspense, dialogue, and the illusion of the first time. Their apprenticeship in transference lit the flame for Klein’s narrative liberties. The Narrative responded to one of the more difficult criticisms leveled at Klein and that she herself had a hand in, namely that her psychoanalytic approach cared nothing for the forces of the external world. Richard’s analysis proved otherwise. It occurred within an extraordinarily urgent context: the frightening external world at war—bombings, terrible suffering, displacement, destruction, death, and what seemed like endless waiting—that instructed both his material and the defenses against the contingencies of his emotional strife. Yet the only war that could be rendered into thoughts belonged to Richard and Mrs. Klein. Narrative of a Child Analysis was Klein’s great attempt to detail the intricate comings and goings of the psychoanalytic situation.