You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author outlines the development of play technique as she practices it. From experience with her first patients she learned to begin early her interpretation of the child's anxieties and defenses against them. Mrs. Klein emphasizes her conviction that to analyze a child one must understand and interpret the fantasies, feelings, anxieties, and experiences expressed by play; or, if play is inhibited, the causes of the inhibition. Her clinical illustrations of this technique vividly demonstrate the counterpoint of early and deep interpretation to the themes appearing in the child's play. The analysis of the transference is central to the technique, 'for by re-experiencing early emotions and fantasies and understanding them in connection with its primal relationships—to its mother and father—it can … revise these … at their root and thus … diminish its anxieties'. Mrs. Klein makes recommendations on technique and discusses the significance of formation of symbols and their disturbances in the psychoses. The paper concludes with some remarks on the influence play technique has exerted on allied fields since its beginnings thirty-five years ago.