The Discovery of the Child as an Object Sui Generis of Cure and Research by Melanie Klein as Reflected in the Notes of her First Child Analyses in Berlin 1921–1926

In psychoanalysis there has existed from the very first an inseparable bond between cure and research. Knowledge brought therapeutic success. It was impossible to treat a patient without learning something new; it was impossible to gain fresh insight without perceiving its beneficent results. Our analytic procedure is the only one in which this precious conjunction is assured.

Freud, with the help of the psychoanalytic method, soon discovered connections between the psychic sufferings of his adult patients and their infantile fantasies, fixations, etc. One might expect children would have been especially interesting patients for this new method. Since the child is in a process of development it could be considered a particularly valuable object to study the complexities of psychic reality. But in fact children were not subjects of analytic ‘cure and research’ during the first two decades of our century. At that time the child served mainly to demonstrate the correctness of the findings concerning infantile sexuality etc. inferred from adult analyses. One hindrance to the development of child analysis was the negative transference. In this paper I would like to outline some of the points which in my view contributed to Melanie Klein's discovery of the child as an object sui generis of psychoanalytic cure and research.

In an earlier paper (Frank and Weiss 1996) I examined, together with Heinz Weiss, an early unpublished manuscript (dating from ) about the analysis of 6-year-old Erna. By comparing it with the published version of 1932 (the third chapter of The Psycho-Analysis of Children), and by adducing additional unpublished material, we described how Klein at first attempted to