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The Psycho-analysis of Children is the culmination of Melanie Klein's early work and, according to the book's explanatory note, it is regarded as a classic text of child analysis. It describes Klein's psychoanalytic play techniques, which she pioneered in Berlin in the early 1920's, the same time that Dr. H.B. Hug-Hellmuth and Anna Freud founded a different line of development.
This book remains Klein's foundation work on child analysis. In it she applies her own conception of mental functioning: “The ego forms an inner world of internalized figures which by the processes of projection and introjection interact with real objects. As a result of sadism to its objects the ego suffers anxiety, and its chief early task is to work through its anxieties, which are psychotic in character, and which gradually, as development proceeds, give way to neurotic anxieties.” Anxiety, if not excessive, encourages development. The first anxieties normally overcome are psychotic, and it is these, which if not modified, form the basis of both childhood psychoses and mental illness in the adult.
The book covers work originally presented in a series of papers written from 1919 to 1939 and collected in The Writings of Melanie Klein (Vol. I). It includes the early stages of the super-ego development and the Oedipus complex. Her view regarding the development of object relations is that the ego, the superego, sexuality, and the modification of parental imagos all affect each other.
When this book was written, Klein had not yet propounded two of her main theoretical stances, the depressive and the paranoid-schizoid positions. This is based on the life and death instincts and on Freud's older notion that the libido passes through psychosexual stages. In fact, only two concepts are put on a new basis. Anxiety is attributed to the death instinct; that is, it