ABSTRACT
In the 1920s, Melanie Klein began to develop an analytic treatment that enabled her to work with very small children, with limited verbal means of communication. She began to recognise that although children's play seemed very different from communications in adult classical analysis, it was the child patient's way of free associating, and she began to observe and use it to explore their inner con¯icts and phantasies. Her abiding interest in the nature of anxiety, and her conviction that children had a capacity to understand themselves, also enabled her to initiate an interpretive approach to her child patients' material in all its forms: play, words, phantasies and behaviour. This brought her into increasing con¯ict with some colleagues who were using a more educative technique in their work with children.
