Book
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.
Main ideas
- A complete child analysis is documented session by session, reconstructed from notes Klein wrote after each hour of a four-month treatment in 1941.
- The child's drawings, play, verbal associations and dreams are the material Klein interprets, and many of the drawings are reproduced alongside her reading of them.
- The narrative shows technique in its course: how each interpretation affected what emerged in the sessions that followed.
- Accompanying notes link the clinical material to Klein's theoretical conclusions, making the book a guide to the technique of psychoanalysing children.