Transference in child analysis: A comparative reading of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein

The concept of transference is central to the theory and practice of psychanalysis. In child analysis, you face specific difficulties when handling it. Child analysis has from the 1920s onwards been dominated by two names: Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. A major controversy between these two arose over precisely the question of transference. In this article, their different views come to expression in a fictive dialogue on vignettes from an analysis with a 4-year old girl. I will show that the disagreement between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein is at least partly due to the fact that they did not always clarify their definitions of basic concepts, and further, that they did not discover that their definitions sometimes differed. We can also guess that the differences between their respective positions were exaggerated for polemical reasons. If you probe at depth, it turns out that both Klein's and Anna Freud's views of transference are more complex than we might expect at first. Their different views mirror different ways of describing development, the inner world, the structure and formation of the personality.