Narrative of a Child Analysis

"It’s well known that Sigmund Freud discovered the child in the adult, while his patients practised free association on the couch. Melanie Klein then went on to excavate the infant embedded in the child, starting off the profession of what became known as psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapy. This evolved from her first analyses of her own and her friends’ children (not something which would be acceptable in our more advanced understanding now of how treatment works) to become one of the major treatments in the British National Health Service for unhappy, deprived and traumatised children, as well as those with serious psychotic illnesses. The couch, of course, is not an option with a small child. Klein introduced a box of toys into the playroom, and willingly took on the roles and rules her small patients assigned to her in their play: the naughty dog, the disobedient child, the monster mummy. Parents were transformed in the children’s minds into tyrants, children into saints and sinners. Klein soon realised that play was the child’s royal road to the unconscious, and that little children’s worlds, like those of adults, were battlegrounds of love and hate: the wish to love and preserve being undermined by the wish to possess and destroy, from the beginning, and from the first bodily experiences of satisfaction or frustration. It’s only gradually, she argued, that these two warring aspects can be brought together into some kind of integration. Whether we ever achieve this fully is doubtful, but we can try. This is a potent conflict and explains in part why children (and adults) were so gripped by the Star Wars series of films – what Klein laid bare were the internal world wars at the heart of every ordinary child’s mind. She and Freud’s daughter Anna were the first major child practitioners, with Klein working privately (and her teachings later became the foundation of thinking at the Tavistock Clinic – an internationally renowned training centre) while Anna Freud established first the Hampstead War nurseries [which provided foster care for orphans], and later the Hampstead Clinic which was renamed the Anna Freud Clinic after her death, and is now a world-renowned centre of research. There were differences and difficulties between them from the beginning, a conflict which you could see in a broad sense as being their struggle for the honour of being Freud’s true daughter. In personality they could hardly have been more dissimilar: Anna Freud was a quiet, shy woman, while Melanie Klein, as her biographer Phyllis Grosskurth averred, was ‘absolutely never shy’. After several skirmishes along the way, their theoretical differences resulted in a head-to-head confrontation called ‘The Controversial Discussions’ from 1941-5, where the two women and their respective followers battled about theory and technique. It was a prolonged and rather damaging conflict, which resulted in the formation of three psychoanalytic schools, the Freudians, the Kleinians and the Independents. In Narrative of a Child Analysis Klein describes her work during the war with a 10-year-old school-refusing child, Richard, when they were both evacuated to Pitlochry. Unsurprisingly, Richard co-opts Hitler and the opposing armies and navies into his own private internal war, his Empire of Mum, as he called it, giving Klein the opportunity to show in detail day by day the unconscious conflicts and rivalries which had produced such profound anxiety in the boy. Richard wanted to be sole possessor of his mother’s love, to the exclusion of his father and brother. Here was Freud’s original notion of the Oedipus complex writ large."