Play technique

Melanie Klein's method of analysing young children, worked out in Berlin in the early 1920s and set out in her 1926 paper on the psychological principles of early analysis. Each child has a set of small, simple toys of its own: little figures, cars, animals, bricks, paper and pencils. They are kept in a plainly furnished room, and the analyst treats what the child does with them, along with its talk and behaviour, as the equivalent of an adult's free associations. The analyst interprets the anxieties and phantasies the play expresses, including the negative transference, directly and in words the child can follow. The analyst does not educate or reassure. Klein held that the technique let analysis reach children under three, and what it showed her became the basis of her theory of early anxieties, internal objects and the positions. Anna Freud's more educative approach to child analysis was its main rival.