Chapter 2 Kleinian thought: Overview and Personal View1

All her life, in spite of the controversies and furore raging around her, Klein thought of her work as following in the footsteps of Freud, as an extension of his work. In my view too, there is a consistent allegiance throughout Klein's work to what she regarded as the essential spirit of Freud's approach and technique. But she was an innovator. She regarded the play of a child as the counterpart to the free association of adults. In her play technique Klein was fully prepared to enact many (though not all) of the roles suggested to her by the child in order to arrive at an understanding of the child's motives and feelings. She was critical in 1927 of Anna Freud for introducing educational elements into child analysis and for emphasizing the positive transference and not interpreting the negative transference (Klein 1927a). Klein's descriptions of her technique with adults years later in 1943 (King and Steiner 1991: 635-8) and in 1952 (‘The origins of transference’, 1952a) are basically very similar to her technique as she described it in 1927, and she clearly thought that both were closely based on Freud. (Anna Freud, however, thought otherwise; see King and Steiner 1991: 629-34.)

Of crucial importance in Klein's work is that it began in the study and treatment of children. She was not the first analyst to treat children, having been preceded by Freud and the father of Little Hans and by Hug-Hellmuth; Anna Freud had started analytic work with older children at about the same time as Klein, though along rather different lines. But Klein invented an analytic way of using the technique

of play, which gave even very young children under 3 years of age a suitable medium for expressing their thoughts and feelings, a medium which could easily be combined with their developing capacity to express themselves in words. The invention of this new technique uncovered new data and slowly gave Klein an unshakeable conviction in the reality of the