The Psycho-Analysis of Children

Melanie Klein's first book was published in 1932, in German in Vienna by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag and in English by the Hogarth Press as The Psycho-Analysis of Children, translated by Alix Strachey. It sets out the play technique she had devised for analysing children, which carried psychoanalytic theory and practice into early childhood and made the analysis of very young children possible. Part one, on the technique of child analysis, presents its psychological foundations and the technique of early analysis. It goes on to analysis in the latency period and at puberty, and includes the case of an obsessional neurosis in a six-year-old girl and chapters on neurosis in children and on children's sexual activities. Part two, on early anxiety-situations and their effect on the child's development, draws theory from this clinical work. It covers the early stages of the Oedipus conflict, which Klein places in the first year of life; an early and harsh super-ego and its relation to obsessional neurosis; the part played by sadism and anxiety; and the effect of early anxiety-situations on the development of the ego and on the sexual development of the girl and of the boy. The book thus sought the roots of neuroses and psychoses in children and adults alike. Later editions add a preface to the third edition in which Klein traces how her views on some of its central hypotheses developed. The book has been translated into many languages, Hebrew among them.