Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein (b. 1882–d. 1960) proposed a revolutionary way of thinking about children and child psychoanalysis that led to discoveries related to the understanding of the functioning, structure, and growth of the mind, as well as an original method for the psychoanalytic treatment of children. The creation of her play technique redefined child psychoanalysis, transformed adult psychoanalysis, and opened new areas including the psychoanalysis of psychosis, autism and borderline conditions, group analysis, and interdisciplinary studies on issues that affect the child’s world. Klein started working with children at a time when child analysis occupied a marginal position in psychoanalysis; children were considered unanalyzable, or in danger if analyzed. Klein’s freedom of thought led her to test psychoanalytic theory and method in her clinical encounters with children, resulting in her concept of the child as a unique object of psychoanalytic treatment and investigation. Her radically original approach to child analysis facilitated the study and treatment of the earliest and deepest functioning of the psyche. The infant was conceived of as born with its objects and with an ego from birth, equipping the infant with the capacity to relate, to love, and to hate the other, to differentiate between me and not-me, inside and outside, and to phantasize. Klein’s theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is a theory on changes in the link between the ego and its objects and ensuing anxieties. The task in development is to master this related anxiety and transform it into language and thought, this occurring in the context of the relationship with the mother/other/analyst. Klein took children extremely seriously. Her child clinical material offers vivid descriptions of the child’s mind and the contact she made with challenging young patients. Klein had an obvious passion for clinical work and curiosity about the child’s unconscious discourse, her intuition, and capacity for observation. Available for the child, playing out the roles attributed to her, adhering to phantasy, receiving positive and negative transferences, intuitively registering anxiety and interpreting it: Klein gives meaning to the child’s experience. The main focus of this article is on the relevance of Kleinian discourse for the study of the child and the thinking on the needs of and dangers affecting children in the 21st century.

Between Instincts and Intelligence: The Precarious Sciences of Child Identity in Twentieth-Century Britain

The psychoanalysis of children began to flourish in the 1920s. In exactly the same period, the technique of intelligence testing also began to expand. Yet the relation between these two theoretical advances is often overlooked and misunderstood. This article focuses on the British context and considers why it is vital to consider the history of child psychoanalysis in relation to intelligence testing. The first half considers the growth of child psychoanalysis from the 1920s and reflects on how psychoanalytically informed thinkers such as Jean Piaget, Susan Isaacs and Donald Winnicott considered children's intellectual capacities in relation to emotional engagement. The second half considers major changes in approaches to mental health and ‘mental deficiency’ in the late 1950s, and explores how this led to a mounting criticism of psychoanalytic theories of ‘autistic’ and ‘psychotic’ thought. The article concludes with a reflection on how political change in the 1970s and 1980s influenced new models of child development and encouraged new psychoanalytic work.

Faulty Theory, Failed Therapy: Frances Tustin, Infant and Child Psychoanalysis, and the Treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders

In this article, I explore two epistemologies for theorizing infancy and treating autism—infant and child psychoanalysis expounded by Frances Tustin and colleagues and developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience. I address two main issues: (a) how early psychoanalytic insights informed empirical developments and theoretical scholarship in both infant psychoanalysis and developmental psychology, and (b) how the study of infant development within psychoanalysis has been derailed by faulty theorizing and failure to incorporate scientific scholarship on infant development into their theories and practice. First, I review current research on infancy including psychoanalytic contributions that have incorporated scientific methods and evidence. I then juxtapose this work with Frances Tustin’s theory of autism as an exemplar of the problematic theorizing about infant development that remains unchallenged, even today, in some psychoanalytic circles, and how that theory is operationalized in treatment. I discuss possible reasons for the failure to revise theory and therapeutic practice and the adherence to faulty perceptions of “successful” therapeutic outcome. Despite these derailments, I conclude that a marriage of science and psychoanalysis (that is convergent with developmental research) is not only possible; indeed, it has produced talented progeny who have immeasurably advanced our understanding of human functioning across the life span by further illuminating the mysteries of infant experience.