Narrative of a Child Analysis

Melanie Klein's last book, published after her death in 1961 as the fourth volume of The Writings of Melanie Klein. It recounts, day by day, her four-month analysis of "Richard", a ten-year-old boy, which ran from April to August 1941, during the Second World War. Working from the detailed notes she wrote after every session, Klein sets out her interpretations of the boy's drawings, play, verbal associations and reports of dreams, and follows how each interpretation bore on the material of the sessions after it. The boy's drawings are reproduced. Notes accompanying the sessions connect the clinical events to her theoretical conclusions and comment on technique, so that the book serves as a guide to the psychoanalysis of children; its publishers present it as a companion to her earlier The Psycho-Analysis of Children.