The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children

"While Klein exposed a word full of phantasied people or ‘objects’, dramas played out on an internal stage, Anna Freud developed her ideas about the mind full of powerful impulses needing to be managed by the ego’s reality sense and the superego’s moral sense. Klein remains best known for her work with very young children, but Anna Freud’s work centred more on the school-age child. The interpretation of the raging id, that seething cauldron full of unacceptable and uncivilised urges, was, she thought, ‘only a means to an end’ and she saw the ego as ‘the proper field of observations. It is, so to speak, the medium through which we try to get a picture of the two other institutions’. She was much more open to the notion of the power of environmental influences, and the primary significance of the parents (which meant she rejected Klein’s idea of a child having a transference to the analyst from the beginning). The Psycho-Analytic Treatment of Children, written in 1927, sums up her views, her theoretical framework and her profound criticisms of Melanie Klein. Later she wrote persuasively about adolescence, and all her work was collected and published in 1974."