Melanie Klein and Child Analysis
Robin Anderson

Children were both a cause for concern, and of considerable interest from the earliest days of psychoanalysis.  The Little Hans case is probably the most famous example, but it is certain that the group around Freud many of whom were young parents had concerns about their children, and wished that they could be helped in the way that their parents now could be and discussed them with Freud.  However, it was not until after the First World War that the first children became subjects of analytic treatment in their own right.  Melanie Klein, with the encouragement first of Ferenczi, and then Abrahams was very interested in early development and had wondered about trying to see if she could help children directly, which both of them encouraged her to do.  Of course, it was obvious that children could not be expected to manage an adult psychoanalytic setting of the couch and free associations and this was going to be a considerable problem.  Other pioneers, in particular Anna Freud felt at that time that children under the age of seven could not be helped directly, because before that age they could not co-operate with the adult technique.

Melanie Klein started to see patients in the ‘Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinic’ and her first patient was a young boy called Felix starting on the 1^st February 1921.  She says, that quite intuitively, she decided to get some toys belonging to her children, which she lent to Felix who immediately began to play with them and Melanie Klein found that she could understand this in much the same way as when her adult patients brought their free associations.  This was the beginning of her technique of child analysis, which over the next 10 years, she developed in detail.  She wanted as far as possible, to be able to analyse children in the way that adults were analysed.  That is to say, to adopt the technique in which there was no teaching or reassuring, but rather an attention to the meaning of the play, the transference and the unconscious phantasies being expressed. Indeed she strongly felt that children developed transference to the analyst which was just as strong as it is in adults.  Instead of lying on a couch and free associating the child had a simple playroom, with a box or drawer of his or her own small toys that the child could manipulate easily and which would not be too representative, giving maximum opportunity for the child's own imagination to be expressed.  In addition there were other play materials like paper and crayons, string, a ball, some cups  and a sink with taps.  The room itself and even the analyst were also incorporated into the child's play so that some of the play takes the form of role-play like the child playing a strict teacher and the analyst being asked to be the naughty child.  Of course, the language used in interpreting to the child would be simple and age-appropriate.

Analysing children places many demands on the analyst, which are more extreme and severe than work with most adult patients.  It is often necessary, to be able to process complex material quickly to be able to "interpret under fire," as Bion described it.  To do this, the analyst is required, often very rapidly, to observe manifest behaviour which can sometimes be quite robust, to consider personal feelings and their possible relevance to the child's behaviour, to come to a view about the underlying meaning of this in the child, and to respond by interpretation.

Using this technique of child analysis was of enormous importance in the development of Melanie Klein's theories, and especially on her emphasis of the importance of infantile experience in disturbance of later life. In ‘The Psychoanalytic Play Technique' (1955, p122), Klein states that:

“….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. I do not mean by this that my later work was a direct application of the play technique; but the insight that 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.”

Although changes in technique followed the developments of adult post Kleinian analysis the basic setting and approach to child analysis is still largely as Melanie Klein described it. It is interesting to notice how accessible child analytic material is to non-child analysts, whilst the superficial characteristics of the setting are so different.  However, once we see adult material as consisting of a constant process of action through words, that it is not so much that children are like little adults in their analyses, but rather that adults in analysis continue to be children, then it is not so mysterious.  There is a sense in child analytic material that a veneer of adult respectability, civilisation, is not present; and although it often makes for a very uncomfortable time, many analysts find it useful to be that much nearer to the unconscious.  This gives a sense of rawness, that allows the gestalt of the underlying object relations to become more visible as it allows the transference to stand out in relief. Child analysts who are adult trained often say that their adult work is enriched by their child analytic experience.

 Over the years many psychoanalysts from the Institute of Psychoanalysis also trained as child analysts and indeed during the 1950s about half the members were also child psychoanalysts the majority of whom had trained in the Melanie Klein Technique. This is a measure of how cutting edge child analysis was felt to be at that time. Now these findings from child analysis have moved into the adult field and there are fewer child analysts though still a significant number and there is still a training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis which recently has become more popular again.

In the late 1940s Esther Bick with the support of John Bowlby founded the child psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic.  Esther Bick wanted to see if child analytic work could be brought to the new National Heath Service and convinced Melanie Klein that it was possible to conduct authentic psychoanalytic treatment for children seen with less frequency than the 5 (or 6!) times weekly treatments.  Melanie Klein found this quite convincing and so with her blessing the first training using her technique was started. The training has been led at different times by other internationally known child analysts and child psychotherapists Martha Harris, Donald Meltzer, Gianna Williams, Anne Alvarez and Margaret Rustin to name but a few.  It has continued ever since and is now the largest child psychotherapy training in the UK.  Later the wish to spread child analytic work beyond London led first to Edinburgh with the training of the Scottish Institute of Human Relations and more recently the Northern School of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy and the Birmingham Trust for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. There are also many trainings in psychoanalytic institutes and child psychotherapy organisations all over the world using Melanie Klein’s technique.

Thus Melanie Klein’s contribution to the analysis of children lives on in vital and developing ways as an essential part of psychoanalysis.

Robin Anderson

June 2008

Dr Robin Anderson (M.B., B.S., M.R.C.Pych.,) is a child and adult psychoanalyst in part-time private practice and is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and British Psychoanalytical Society.