Teaching Klein

For the past few years one of London's psychotherapy training institutions has employed me to teach a ten-week series of seminars.

I thought I would write about the experience of teaching Klein and about the lessons I have learned in doing so. I hope this is not an exercise in teaching my grandmothers to suck eggs! Rather, with the growth of courses on psychotherapeutic work with children and the continued application of Klein's ideas to clinical practice, I felt my experience may be useful to budding teachers and to anyone who may be invited to teach Kleinian theory in training institutions.

Of all psycho-analytic theories, Kleinian theory seems to be the most difficult for students to swallow. For instance, Freud's, Jung's and Winnicott's ideas on infancy are usually received with more friendliness than are Klein's. The reasons are not hard to discern. Klein's descriptions of the early life of the infant are unsettling and disturbing, especially the passage from the persecution, fragmentation and swings between contentment and hatred of the paranoid-schizoid position to the dawning of guilt and painful concern of the depressive position. The disturbing minutiae of Klein's descriptions combined with her rather bald, remorseless style leave many new readers of Klein reeling from the impact. ‘Surely babies don't suffer like this!’ students say, then demand how we can know about the content of early experience. Students who have had experience of infant observation find these questions easier to deal with, and for them the experience of reading Klein can be tempered and fleshed out by their observations. But reading Klein without parallel infant observation is, initially, a difficult business and feels persecutory, especially to students with young babies.

Though groups of students vary in their theoretical sophistication, their clinical experience and the dynamics peculiar to each group, I have found that teaching Klein goes through two distinct phases.