Melanie Klein in Berlin

Her First Psychoanalyses of Children

Claudia Frank, Elizabeth Spillius, Sophie Leighton, Sue Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134013265
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book Claudia Frank discusses how Melanie Klein began to develop her psychoanalysis of children. Melanie Klein in Berlin: Her First Psychoanalyses of Children offers a detailed comparative analysis of both published and unpublished material from the Melanie Klein Archives.

By using previously unpublished studies, Frank demonstrates how Klein enriched the concept of negative transference and laid the basis for the innovations on both technique and theory that eventually led not only to changes in child analysis, but also to changes in the analysis of adults. Frank also uncovers the influence that this had on Klein's later theories of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and on her understanding of psychotic anxieties.

The first seven chapters in the book provide an explanation of the essence of Klein's approach to child psychoanalysis covering topics including:

• the inevitability and usefulness of negative transference
• development of play
• early conscious and unconscious phantasies.

Part two provides a translation of Klein's unpublished notes on the treatments of four of the children she analysed in Berlin: 7-year-old Grete, 2-year-old Rita, 7-year-old Inge and 6-year-old Erna.

Melanie Klein in Berlin is the first text to make extensive use of Klein's unpublished papers, clinical notes, diaries and manuscripts. It will appeal to anyone involved in child psychoanalysis and the development of Melanie Klein's thinking.

PART ONE

1
Introduction¹

my work with both children and adults, and my contributions to psycho-analytic theory as a whole, derive ultimately from the play technique evolved with young children…. the insight I gained into early development, into unconscious processes, and into the nature of the interpretations by which the unconscious can be approached, has been of far-reaching influence on the work I have done with older children and adults.

(Klein, 1955, WMK III,² p. 122)

The technique of child analysis that Melanie Klein developed was the beginning of a psychoanalytic revolution and gradually led her to changes and development not only of a new technique but also of new theories. In this book I describe my research into the very early period of Klein’s work in which she developed the play technique and the most basic of her new insights into early development. I discuss the development of her method of child analysis through examining the clinical case notes of four of her early child analyses in Berlin, which I compare with her unpublished manuscripts and later published papers on these same four children.

Klein’s attitude towards children and child analysis was very different from that of the other pioneers of child analysis. She was not primarily interested, as they were, only in showing that the preexisting psychoanalytic ideas about infantile sexuality which had been discovered in the analysis of adults were also to be found in children. She did believe this, and indeed it was her starting point, and she soon found much supporting evidence for it. But she found additional and somewhat contradictory evidence as well, and this she stated in a straightforward manner and gradually proceeded to base new ideas and theories upon it.

Very briefly, the most important discoveries and ideas of this early period were as follows. First, the view that negative transference was an inevitable part of the analytic situation and that understanding and interpreting it could greatly increase access to the child’s unconscious mind and could help to give the child increased and constructive understanding of him- or herself. Second, in about 1923 Klein began to use small toys as a standard part of the setting of child analysis, and came to consider that the play of children could be regarded as equivalent to the free association of adults. Third, she perceived that in their play small children expressed very ferocious phantasies which were accompanied by acute anxiety. This led her to the idea of an early and very persecutory superego, and, slightly later, to the idea that the Oedipus complex began much earlier than Freud had thought. Fourth, she developed the view that, similarly, anxiety-arousing and difficult phantasies lay at the heart of intellectual inhibition. Finally, in this early period she developed new ideas about childhood neurosis and especially about obsessional neurosis. This early work, as Klein says in the passage quoted above, had immense influence on her later work with both children and adults and on the development of still further ideas.

For the most part—like Freud in his discussion of Little Hans’s analysis—Klein believed that children would be helped, not harmed, by knowing the truth about themselves and their unconscious mind. At the beginning, when she was doubtful, Karl Abraham reassured her and she pressed on. She also treated children with great respect, assuming that they were just as willing as adults, if not more so, to face their anxieties and cope with their resistances.

I think it is also evident from her clinical notes as well as her papers that she had a remarkable capacity to make emotional contact with children. She was quick to make associations and symbolic links, a capacity that enabled her to reach an imaginative understanding of a child’s play and speech as expressing their phantasies and their dilemmas about their parents, the primal scene, their Oedipus situation, their siblings, their struggles with love and hate. Indeed, she was sometimes accused of making implausible ‘symbolic’ and ‘deep’ interpretations and she was quick to reply that she did so only when she had several congruent bits of evidence, and in any case she was careful to observe the effect of these interpretations on the child’s anxiety and subsequent play and on his understanding of himself. She might have pointed out (but did not) that many of Freud’s interpretations were equally symbolic and deep.

In most schools of analysis we have become more cautious about these intuitive leaps, but they were an important part of Klein’s creative and courageous approach in the early years which are the subject matter of this book, and which, in turn, led to Klein’s later work and so have eventually contributed to current trends in psychoanalysis.

1.1 ‘Vergisst alle Träume’ [Forgets all dreams]: Melanie Klein’s clinical starting point in 1921

‘Forgets all dreams’. This was the first note Melanie Klein made on ‘Felix’, the boy I shall call her ‘first child patient’. She began this first analysis at the Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinik at the beginning of February 1921, having moved to Berlin from Budapest (or rather Ružomberok) at the start of the year. Felix was a 13-year-old boy who was an important figure in her early papers (Klein, 1923a, 1923b, 1925). When Melanie Klein began her handwritten records of the therapy with ‘Forgets all dreams’, she was stressing that her patient’s attitude towards dreams was a crucial element of the material that interested her (and us) analytically. This initial note suggests that she agreed with Freud in seeing an understanding of dreams as ‘the royal road’. At the same time, with ‘forgetting’, she was recording her perception of her patient’s resistance. Let us remember that in Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud stated inter alia that ‘it shows that there was no lack of a hostile [i.e. resistant] purpose at work in the forgetting of the dream’ (Freud, 1900, Standard Edition (S.E.) 5, p. 513). The perception of resistance, of hostility, of a form of negative transference is recorded in this statement—the first note of what was to become a major theme in Klein’s early work.

My thesis is that this initial note by Klein, ‘Forgets all dreams’, contains the essence of two factors crucial to the development of what was later to become known as Kleinian psychoanalysis: the assumption that contemporary psychoanalytic theory and technique could be applied to the analysis of children, and the perception of negative transference as a challenge to psychoanalytic understanding. What does this mean? When Melanie Klein began her clinical activities, it was only natural that she should make use of the established method with its associated theoretical views. Thus she did not start out with the conviction that she would have to develop a new method, but employed in working with children and adolescents the psychoanalytic method developed for adults. She took over the usual setting used for adults, including at first the use of the couch, she interpreted the Oedipus complex as formulated at the time for adult patients, and so forth.

In my view, despite all the errors that the application of this method involved, it enabled her to learn from experience. She was able to take seriously inconsistencies between her findings and those of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and technique, and gradually she added to and revised the latter. Her opportunity and her originality lay in her conviction that children could be analysed in basically the same way as adults. At first, as I have implied above, she took this very literally, in that when she began her work at the Psychoanalytische Poliklinik in Berlin in 1921, she offered children the couch, asked them what they associated with material as it arose, and interested herself in dreams and memories of early childhood. In adopting this approach, she was going down a different path from the one usually followed when one had professional dealings with children, which in some way or other involved educating them. If the specific form of the analytical approach she initially adopted was not appropriate for children, if to some extent they accordingly rejected it, nevertheless from the outset she acted within an analytical framework. As we shall see, this enabled her gradually to develop a more adequate approach. Thus even if to some extent Melanie Klein did children an injustice when she saw their rejection of the setting that was inappropriate for them only as an expression of their negative transference, their fears and hostility, her point of access—seeing the rejection as resistance that needed to be understood in analytical terms—opened up the way to working analytically with the child without making over-hasty concessions to the child’s external reality, which can so quickly close down reflection on unconscious meanings.

My beginning with ‘Forgets all dreams’ as exemplifying Klein’s starting point could give rise to a misunderstanding. It might seem that the first thing Klein did was to ask her patients about dreams. Although we cannot be certain about this, I consider it unlikely, since her notes on the other four patients in 1921 do not begin in the same way. Indeed, some of them do not contain the word ‘dream’ at all. There is a later comment in the treatment notes to the effect that Felix’s mother was considering returning to her analysis with Simmel. It is possible that she had explained analysis to her son in advance by mentioning dreams, among other things. As far as we can judge, Klein assigned a significant role to dreams in the clinical situation without overemphasising the point. Hence if in practice dreams did not play an outstanding part in these early therapies in quantitative terms, they had probably been crucial to Melanie Klein’s initial personal interest in psychoanalysis.

We learn from her unpublished autobiography of 1959 that Freud’s work On Dreams (1901a) represented her first encounter with psychoanalysis:

While living in Budapest, I had become deeply interested in Psychoanalysis. I remember that the first book of Freud that I read was a small book on dreams and, when I read it, I knew that was it—that was what I was aiming at, at least during these years when I was very keen to find what would satisfy me intellectually and emotionally. I went into analysis with Ferenczi […] and he very much encouraged my idea of devoting myself to analysis, particularly child analysis, for which he said I had a particular talent.

Against this background it is hardly surprising that Freud’s theory of dreams was of crucial importance to Klein’s conceptualisation of the analysis of play, which she was to develop in Berlin in subsequent years. In her first lecture in London, ‘Die psychologischen Grundlagen der psychoanalytischen Technik’ [‘The psychological foundations of psychoanalytic technique’], in 1925, she expressed this as follows:

The child expresses his phantasies, wishes and actual experiences in a symbolic way through play […]. In doing so, he makes use of the same language that we know from dreams, which after all also originates from the infantile inner life. It is reasonable that when an understanding of this language originating from infantile inner life is of such importance in adult analysis, one of the fundamental requirements of child analysis is to take account of it. It is an archaic mode of expression, one that we know to be phylogenetically acquired, which the child uses, and we can understand it fully only if we approach it in the way Freud has taught us to approach the language of dreams. Symbolism is only a part of it; if we wish to understand the language of play correctly in relation to the child’s whole behaviour during the analytic session, we must take into consideration the mechanisms we know from the dream work—displacement, condensation, reworking to make something representable (of which symbolism is again only a part), secondary revision and all the methods of representation employed in the dream.

(Klein (1925i), unpublished manuscript)

The aim of the present study is to portray the developments in Klein’s technique and theories in her crucial early years, 1921–1926, on the basis of hitherto unpublished records of her analyses in Berlin in 1921–1926 and of unpublished manuscripts that can be consulted at the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine in London,³ together with her publications. To some extent, the notes on Melanie Klein’s early analyses enable us to draw up a kind of biography of the work of these early years. In my view this material, despite its great diversity, constitutes a sort of counterpart to the Freud/Fließ correspondence, which gives us an insight into the crucial years of Freud’s initial discoveries. In Freud’s correspondence we can experience with Freud his discovery of the Oedipus complex, we can share in the origin of the interpretation of dreams, and we can follow the various stages of the maturing, rejection and development of many other theoretical and technical matters. Unfortunately we do not have a comparable correspondence between Melanie Klein and a friend, reporting on work with patients, reflections and developing theories alongside news of herself and family life. On the other hand, in her case we have direct evidence of her initial clinical experiences in the form of primarily handwritten notes on her first analyses (for a detailed description, see Chapter 2). The material available to us in Melanie Klein’s own hand allows us to follow the development of her technique through to analysis of play, as well as her theoretical innovations as they suggested themselves to her in the clinical situation. She learned from her little patients about their sadistic phantasies and analysed their meaning. She observed anxieties about a punishing internal entity in a girl as young as 2¾ years old and conceived of an early superego at that time. She took her small patients’ Oedipal phantasies and games seriously and described the pre-genital Oedipus complex. She discovered the attitude of girls to their own genitals. We find precursors of the differentiation between systems of anxiety and defence, which she was later to describe as the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’ and the ‘depressive position’. However, it was to be a long time before she developed these nuclei of a new conceptualisation that did not emerge at the outset but followed in the course of her endeavours to understand her clinical experiences.⁴

To illustrate this, let us return to the analysis of Felix. I have described how I saw Klein’s recording of the ‘forgetting’ as her perception of resistance on her patien...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part One
• Part Two
• Bibliography