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Child psychoanalysis does exist and today has reached an advanced age.
The field of child psychoanalysis might appear to be heterogeneous. It is true that it had two founders and that this contributed to the difficulties it has had in developing. There is also no doubt that this helped to contribute to its image. Although the position of Melanie Klein is quite clear, centred as it is on analytical treatment, having read this book and the various sections it contains on Anna Freud, the reader might well have got the impression that the field of psychoanalysis is heterogeneous because of the many different terms employed: psychoanalytical observation, psychoanalytical up-bringing, psychoanalytical psychology, to mention but a few. In fact, and this is the essential point, although Melanie Klein and Anna Freud were interested in different fields and differed in the definition of those fields, they both firmly believed that child analysis could only be based on the psychoanalytical treatment of the child. The treatment of the child is the place of research, the laboratory in which the psychoanalyst can carry out his investigations and which enables him to formulate theories.
We should remember that at the Anna Freud Centre all research on theory was, and is, based on treatment of children, whether for the Index or to draw up the metapsychological profile, even if in some cases data from direct observation were, and are, also used. Contrary to what has often been said, Anna Freud did not fail to distinguish between treatment and observation or up-bringing. It is the theoretical knowledge and the experience acquired during treatment that enables problems of upbringing to be broached or psychoanalytical psychology to be created, she wrote in 1970.
The driving force behind the work of both Klein and Freud was their curiosity of mind. Melanie Klein had an intense need to know, and it was partly an absence of her son’s thirst for knowledge and partly an inhibition of his epistem