Concept
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.
Development
1926
Melanie Klein introduced by
Klein worked out the play technique with her first child patients in Budapest and Berlin and set out its principles in 1926: the child's play, treated like free association, is interpreted directly. In 1955 she looked back on its history and on how it led to her theory.
Relations
- 1926 introduced by Melanie Klein
Klein worked out the play technique with her first child patients in Budapest and Berlin and set out its principles in 1926: the child's play, treated like free association, is interpreted directly. In 1955 she looked back on its history and on how it led to her theory.
Works
- 1926
The Psychological Principles of Early Analysis
Melanie Klein's 1926 paper in Imago sets out the principles on which her play technique with small children rests. She treats a young child's play as a symbolic expression of phantasies, wishes and experiences, comparable to the dream, and holds that it can therefore be interpreted in the way free associations are interpreted in the analysis of adults. On the evidence of analyses of very young children, she argues that Oedipal tendencies and a severe superego appear much earlier in development than psychoanalysis had assumed. The paper appeared in English in 1927 in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis as "The Psychological Principles of Infant Analysis".
- 1955
The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique: Its History and Significance
Published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry in April 1955, this paper is Melanie Klein's late retrospect on how she came to analyse children through play. She traces the technique from her first child cases in Budapest and Berlin to her later work, and describes its setting: the playroom, and the small toys kept for each child alone. She treats the child's play as material on a par with the free associations of adults, to be interpreted as they are, the negative transference included. She also sets out how the play technique led her to her theory of early anxieties, of internal objects and of the positions.
See also
People
References
- The Psychological Principles of Early Analysis1926 Evidence for a relation
- The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique: Its History and Significance1955 Evidence for a relation