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Our object in this section is not to examine the position of child psychoanalysis in every country; rather, we are interested in the spread of the ideas of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud throughout the world, from two viewpoints. One viewpoint takes into consideration the historical dimension, i.e. the particular moment and the agents who were responsible for the spread of child psychoanalysis in a given country. The other is concerned with the way in which the two schools were able to enter the same territory, become mutually exclusive or coexist freely, in other words, whether the language characteristic of each school was able to be understood and make itself heard.
We have chosen four examples, which are all quite distinct. It was perhaps in Argentina that the opposition between the two schools made itself felt the least. Arminda Aberastury, who introduced child psychoanalysis to Argentina, was initially trained in the Anna Freud school of thought, but later, after she had become acquainted with the work of Melanie Klein, she became a convert to Kleinian theory It would therefore seem that in her case, and therefore in Argentina as a whole, the influence of the two schools was exerted in a fairly harmonious fashion. Argentinian psychoanalysts were interested in the observation of the child, in the study of the normative and the disturbed, as was Anna Freud, but some of them also did research into serious childhood disorders using input from Kleinian theories.
For a long time the United States remained the private domain of the Anna Freudians. Historically, this is easily understandable in view of the importance the Viennese immigrants were to assume there; it is not so easy to understand from the conceptual point of view, however. Melanie Klein’s theories were disdained, ignored even until the late 1970s. When he settled in Los Angeles in 1970, Wilfred R.Bion tried to introduce a number of Kleinian concepts. It would appear that this led to new controversies in t