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According to Melanie Klein, the psychoanalysis of a child should be conducted in exactly the same way as that of an adult, but the analysis of verbal associations should be supplemented by the analysis of play. Also, she held that a transference was possible, and that no moral or educational pressure was to be exerted by the analyst. In other words, she adopted Sigmund Freud's adult transference analysis for children. If any changes in Freudian technique were later introduced by Klein, these were in the direction of purer transference analysis, the analyst's role becoming more and more confined to interpretation.
A characteristic of Klein's technique was that she gave preference to the interpretation of “anxiety caused by unconscious fantasy” wherever she could detect it, even when the first results of this appeared to be an increase of the anxiety.
It was this technique that allowed patterns of the mind to surface, patterns never before described, so that Klein's theory of normal and abnormal mental functioning, originally taken from Sigmund Freud, underwent continuous reformulations, parallel to her discoveries in clinical practice.
Basically, Klein observed that the human infant passes through two distinct periods, characterized by different ways of dealing with its own destructiveness. Consequently, the infant is plagued by two different sets of anxieties and defenses against these anxieties. In the