ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author's guiding question, which can be considered as the starting-point for all her subsequent research is: what holds the child back? Klein is seen as willing to engage with what causes her knowledge to stumble. Pontalis reads Klein's first essay as constituting a reversal or change of tack. The author that Klein's own intensification of Freud's shattering of the myth of the innocent child begins, and it is this, according to him, that makes her descriptions of the child's interior world so difficult to take. The author argues that Klein's theory, the more it becomes a system, manifests her desire to 'know' the unconscious in its deepest and earliest form - to be there, as it were, at its birth and to mother it. Melanie Klein observed that she had the possibility of seeing the child and talking with him every day.
