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The book seems to have been written between 1958 and 1960, after Envy and Gratitude, which appeared in 1957. The clinical work, done in 1941, was first written up in The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties, (I. J. Psa. 1945) and then in 1946 came the paper which changed everything: Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (I.J. Psa. 1946).
The first week of the analysis opens like a Chekhov play - immediately all the characters are introduced and all the themes and subplots are hinted at. An unlikely first week in the analysis of a ten year old. It is partly because Mrs Klein had already formulated some ideas in her mind, probably having taken a bit too much history from the mother. Consequently due to being in a hurry she makes mistakes which force things, mistakes in technique and interpretation which she has to make up for later. Her technique as she describes it in The Psycho-analysis of Children, was developed particularly with young children; and the technique with latency, pubertal and adolescent children was really an adaptation from this source. The basis of the technique aimed to establish the analytical situation, which meant getting some sort of transference going. Her way of getting it going was to perform some service to the child's unconscious by diminishing or modifying its deepest anxieties through interpretation.
Now Richard chronologically is a latency child, and you can see that when he comes to her, his manifest anxieties are at a minimum; whereas with small children her experience had always been that, in leaving the mother and coming to the playroom, the child would almost always experience severe persecutory anxieties which could be investigated with even minimal material. But with Richard it is quite different: there is very little manifest anxiety - she is not a doctor, she is not a man; he is quite used to charming and seducing women, and obviously has looked forward to seeing her. What can be seen