Personification in the Play of Children

In this 1929 paper in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Klein takes up a mechanism she had pointed to in earlier work: in play, children invent characters and allot them roles. She draws on the analyses of Erna (6), George (6), Rita (2¾) and several other children. However varied the figures are, she shows, they come down to a few roles: the persecuting super-ego, the threatened but itself cruel id or ego, and a helpful figure, such as a 'fairy mamma', who takes the child's side. She explains personification in two steps. The super-ego is split into the identifications introjected at successive stages of development, and these figures are then projected outward. The earliest super-ego is formed on a pregenital pattern and consists of fantastic imagos that devour and cut to pieces. Kinder imagos, rooted in the oral-sucking stage, open the way to genital primacy and to figures closer to the real parents. Splitting and projection spare the ego the strain of holding a unified, tyrannical super-ego together and keeping its truce with the id. The conflict within the psyche can then be moved into the external world, and this easing of anxiety is a main driving force of the transference. Klein then compares how normal, neurotic, paranoiac and schizophrenic children relate to reality. Schizophrenic children cannot truly play, because their projection fails. Paranoiac children subordinate reality to phantasy and personify richly, but mostly as persecutor and persecuted. Normal children keep a better balance between phantasy and reality. She concludes that the dominance of a terrifying super-ego, introjected in the earliest stages of ego development, is a fundamental factor in the genesis of psychosis. Her lesson for technique is that the analyst must take on whatever roles the child assigns, the hostile ones included, without preferring any. Those roles may be given openly in play or hidden in the negative transference. In this way the frightening imagos can be analysed and give way to milder, more realistic identifications. Play technique thus opens childhood psychoses to diagnosis and cure.