The Psychotherapy of the Psychoses

A short contribution by Melanie Klein to a discussion on the psychotherapy of the psychoses, published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1930. Klein holds that schizophrenia occurs in children more often than is recognised, but that it takes a different form from the adult illness and is commonly mistaken for backwardness or naughtiness. She locates the roots of psychosis in the earliest phase of sadism and the anxieties it gives rise to, and proposes that the analysis of young children could reach these psychotic states.