Erna And Melanie Klein

This session featured a multi-authored paper conceived by its Buenos Aires presenters as a homage both to the creative work of Melanie Klein and to her child patient known as Erna. Erna left Europe as a young adult and spent the rest of her life in Chile, the site of this year's IPA congress. The panellists traced Klein's various presentations of the case (initially at the First Congress of German Psychoanalysis in 1924 and finally as Chapter 3 (‘An obsessive neurosis in a six-year-old girl’) in The Psychoanalysis of Children (1925) in order to demonstrate that this clinical experience was a decisive factor in the evolution of Klein's thinking. Indeed, it was argued that Erna's analysis, which took place in Berlin six times weekly for approximately two and a quarter years between 1924 and 1926, contained forerunners of the central ideas that would ultimately represent Klein's seminal contributions to psychoanalytic theory.

The authors reminded us that when Klein began treatment with 6-year old Erna, she had already developed her technique of play therapy with her former patient Rita. In Rita she had discovered the existence of early neurosis and the early harsh superego connected to the internalisation of an attacked mother. In the play therapy with Erna, Klein learned more about important aspects of this internalisation, and about the phantasies and impulses underlying paranoid and manic depressive anxieties. The authors proposed that these represent the origins of Klein's subsequent theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. Erna also helped Klein to understand the oral and anal nature of the processes of introjection and projection, and thus the influence of internal persecutory states on object relations in the external world. It was with Erna, as well, that Klein made the decisive discovery of infantile psychosis, a pathology masked by the child's obsessive neurosis and comprising a deepseated paranoia linked to the Oedipus complex and homosexuali