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I recently heard a discussion between writer and broadcaster, Eliane Glaser, and Debra Myhill, director of the Centre for Research in Writing at the University of Exeter. They criticized the formulaic, abstruse learning of grammar by young children. If a child is unable to write a fluent sentence, I thought, is it because the idea of conjoining has not been sufficiently recognized, or could it point to a troubled ‘and’: perhaps between mummy and daddy? My mind turned to the book under review.
The book is divided into two sections. Part I comprises four previously unpublished lectures by Klein, dating from 1936 to 1939, supplemented by an autobiography written in 1959. The lectures show us Klein reaching out to educators, who ponder why some children find learning difficult. Part 2 comprises a series of papers (mostly published) based on the Melanie Klein Archive housed in the Wellcome Institute library. Jane Milton introduces the book and provides information on where in the Klein archive relevant material can be found.
Klein introduces educators to psychoanalytic concepts that could explain puzzling inhibitions of learning, especially the emotional dimension of what would otherwise seem to be cognitive deficiencies. She urges her audience to consider the unconscious dimension in children trying to be ‘normal’ but failing. Indeed, the child's unconscious awareness of adult discomfort urges the child to protect the adult, which unconsciously joins with the adult's reluctance to recognize the child's distress. The unfortunate interlocking of child and adult anxieties is part of the subtle relational environment in which children and their defences against anxiety develop. In an example, ‘the child is apt to feel that the “good” parents have changed into “bad” ones, or else that they will never come back because they are destroyed by his own greed and hatred’ (p. 48). The mother to whom he clings protects him from the phantasy, untrusted, feared, bad mother - also his ba