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It is not often that we have a chance to consider in detail, with instance after instance, just how phantasy expresses the inner world of the child. Otto Weininger, Professor of Applied Psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and a remarkably sensitive observer, has an ability to gain the confidence of children in a variety of settings—school, home, play, as well as in therapeutic situations. In this book he outlines in detail how the phantasies of the children he has observed illuminate the theories of Melanie Klein. As Hanna Segal says in the Foreword to the book, Professor Weininger has a deep understanding of Klein's theories, which he has derived from a wide and rich experience. He is to be congratulated, also, for providing a platform in Canada for the expression of Kleinian theories and practice in his creation and editing of the Journal of the Melanie Klein Society.
Working from the principle that phantasy expresses internal and subjective realities, Weininger elaborates ways in which he has seen children express and symbolize their conflicts. He illustrates how conflicts arise from contradictory forces and feelings with which the children are struggling. His examples of how subjective interpretations of experience form the basis of phantasy life are convincing and instructive.
Weininger illustrates from his observations of normal, neurotic and psychotic children ways in which children respond to the realities of their experience by interpreting, or rather 'misinterpreting', these experiences in efforts to increase pleasure and to diminish pain (Riviere, 1936).
Reality testing to bring a less subjective interpretation of experience can be effected in therapy. Weininger gives a moving example of this process in his presentation of details of therapy sessions in work with a disturbed 10-year-old boy. The boy was helped to overcome the very disturbing effect of his phantasies formed by his experiences (his mother had died after a long