Symposium on Child-Analysis

Melanie Klein's contribution to the symposium on child analysis held by the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1927, published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis the same year. It answers, point by point, Anna Freud's book on the technique of child analysis. Klein rejects the educative and reassuring attitude Anna Freud recommended towards child patients. She maintains that children form a full transference, negative as well as positive, and that it has to be interpreted. Because the child's super-ego is already severe in early childhood, she argues, the analysis of children can reach as deep as the analysis of adults.