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During this period (1920–45), Anna Freud, in Vienna, following in the footsteps of her father, and Melanie Klein, in Berlin, following in the footsteps of Karl Abraham, then in London after his death, were each to found their own school of child psychoanalysis.
Their research took them into different fields. With great enthusiasm, Anna Freud worked on the application of psychoanalysis to the child, in the field of education and observation. She was certainly interested in the psychoanalytical treatment of children, but remained reluctant about the existence of child psychoanalysis per se because of the technical and theoretical problems, which, at the time, she thought insuperable.
Melanie Klein, on the other hand, envisaged carrying out psychoanalytical treatment of children from the outset. She developed and perfected her methodology—analysis through play—and, little by little, as she made her clinical discoveries, began to question the foundation of some of Freud’s theories.
Psychoanalysts of the period tended to side with one or other of the two, for they rapidly constituted opposing schools of thought. They were to meet up again in London in 1938 after the Freud family had emigrated from Vienna, and the result was one of the most dramatic confrontations in the history of the psychoanalytic movement: the ‘Controversial Discussions’. The Kleinian school was accused of diverging so much from Freudian theories that at one point it was proposed that they be excluded from the Freudian analytical movement. They were obliged to justify their position and demonstrate that they were in fact faithful to Freudian thinking, which they did in a series of theoretical treatises (see King and Steiner, 1991).
The presentation of these articles and their discussion by representatives of both schools within the British Psychoanalytical Society took place in war-torn London between 1941 and 1944. During one of the working sessions the sirens sounded the alarm but the discussion was s