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Hanna Segal has written a beautifully lucid account of Melanie Klein's techniques.
Melanie Klein, born 1882 in Vienna, daughter of a physician, analyzed by Ferenczi in Budapest, developed child psychoanalysis in Berlin under the influence and encouragement of Abraham. She came to England in 1926 at Ernest Jones's invitation, and “in the course of my work with children, I found this led to considerable changes in the approach to adults. … There are many hints in Freud, which seem prophetic from that angle (he, himself, had never dealt with children) and which, to some extent, foreshadow the consecutive [italics mine] picture of the development of the child from the earliest stages onwards (and its effect on adults), which I have elaborated.” (Unpublished letter, dated 23 Oct., 1959.) From this we may note the emphasis on the logical qualities which characterize Melanie Klein and which resulted in her students' systematic formulations, of which Dr. Hanna Segal is a prominent exponent.
As early as 1929, Melanie Klein stated: “I have come to the conclusion—for which I must give my full reasons elsewhere—that the concept of schizophrenia in particular, and of psychosis in general, as occurring in childhood must be extended, and I think that one of the chief tasks of the children's analyst is to discover and cure psychoses in children.” Mrs. Klein was among the first to appreciate childhood schizophrenia; one notes the extension of this to Segal's frank statements about the analysis of an adult schizophrenic patient. In other words, one of the chief Kleinian variations from “classical” psychoanalysis is the basic implication that earliest mental functioning may be regarded as essentially psychotic, whether or not paranoid-schizoid position or depressive position is maturationally reached. To equate primitive mental functioning with the descriptive psychiatric nomenclature of psychoses may be valuable in analytic supervision, but from a rational point of view, it shows marke