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The ‘Controversies’ have often been mentioned as a mythical period in the history of child psychoanalysis that was better left alone. However, it is now possible to talk openly about them. In 1991, a book called The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–1945, edited by Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner (both members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society) was published. It included the minutes of all the scientific and administrative meetings that took place during the period that was known as the ‘Controversies’. We cannot of course give a detailed summary of this voluminous work (958 pages) but we would like to emphasize its considerable historical interest: for the first time we are able to have direct access to the contents of these controversies and we do not have to just make do with a more or less sectarian version by one or other side.
It has often been said that the ‘Controversies’ were between advocates of Sigmund Freud’s theories, grouped around his daughter Anna, and the advocates of Melanie Klein and her theories. In fact, from a scientific viewpoint, the question was to decide whether Melanie Klein’s theories followed the lines set out by Freud, or whether her ideas had become incompatible with those of Freud. A reminder of the main tenets of Kleinian theories which were in dispute might be helpful at this point:
She questioned primal narcissism. Melanie Klein believed that narcissism and autoeroticism existed but that they were already connected with frustration and with the phantasies about internal and external objects.
She assumed the existence of an early object relationship, and unconscious phantasies; this was connected with the idea of a rudimentary ego capable of establishing object relationships and of producing mental processes such as introjection and projection.
She affirmed the existence of pregenital forms of the Oedipus complex, in particular a primitive Oedipus complex, existing parallel to an early superego, which was not, as Freud suggested, t