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In this chapter I describe some of what I regard as the central themes in the development and current practice of technique among British Kleinian psychoanalysts.
It is important, as always, to remember that Melanie Klein's work began with the analysis of children. Looking back now to her earliest work, she seems to have had a touchingly naive faith in Freud's method. When she began analysing children (in addition to her own child, ‘Fritz’) she tried to get them to lie down on the couch and to free-associate, and it was some time before she realized that this method was not really appropriate (Frank 2000). Eventually she went to get an armful of her own children's toys for one of her younger patients to use and so embarked on the famous ‘play technique’ (Klein 1955a). But in spite of the play technique Klein stuck as closely as possible to Freud's method: sessions five times a week, rigorous maintenance of the setting, emphasis on transference as the central focus of analyst-patient interaction, and emphasis on interpretation as the main agent of therapeutic change. These features are not, of course, specifically Kleinian; they are characteristic, though to varying degrees, of most psychoanalysts.
There is something very vivid about Klein's way of working, a sense of immediacy and immense bodily concreteness about the children's phantasies that she deduced. Looking back now, some of this early work seems striking but hardly surprising, though at the time it must have been quite shocking. For example, here is Peter, aged 3 years and 9 months, in his first and second session (Klein 1932a: 17).
At the very beginning of his first session Peter took the toy carriages and cars and put them first one behind the other and then
Page 183side by side, and alternated this arrangement several times. In between he took two horse-drawn carriages and bumped one into another, so that the horses’ feet knocked together, and said: ‘I’ve got a new little brother called Fritz.’ I asked him what