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This is a presentation by Mrs. Klein of the material from her analyses of two children followed by a theoretical discussion of the mechanisms underlying their anxieties and a comparison of her conclusions pertaining to superego formation and the resolution of the Oedipus complex with those of Freud.
Both the accounts of the two analyses and her theoretical discussion are of the same tenor and lead to conclusions similar to those found in her book, Die Psychoanalyse des Kindes. Here, as there, her descriptions of unconscious fantasies are so mixed with logically unsatisfying formulations, and direct observations so indistinguishable from interpretations that, in the main, one is unable to follow the text with any real feeling of understanding, much less to report it with clarity.
Mrs. Klein's theoretical differences with Freud concern themselves first with the development of the superego. She holds that the superego is formed not in consequence of the resolution of the Oedipus complex, but that its development begins in the first year of life as a result of guilt feelings consequent upon wishes to devour the breast, i.e., as a result of fear of retaliation by the mother. She thus in effect fails to differentiate between fantasy and introjection or—to carry her thesis to its logical conclusion—she implies that everything not in the outside world, that is, every thought in the child's mind, is an introjected object! And, in fact, this is just the kind of mental world in which Mrs. Klein would have us believe the child lives—a world which is composed exclusively of loved and hated, good and bad, enjoyed and feared, introjects.
This theory ultimately leads Mrs. Klein to postulate what must be inherited introjects for she says that 'the infant girl … has an unconscious knowledge that her body contains potential children whom she feels to be her most precious possession'. At the same time the girl knows that her father's penis is the giver of babies, and fantasies that h