ABSTRACT
In the decades after the death of Freud in 1939, the psychoanalytic tradition in Britain was substantially shaped by child analysis. Melanie Klein’s discoveries emerged from psychoanalytic practice with children, which was based on her ‘play technique’. Some of Donald Winnicott’s most important ideas were developed through work with children, and through study of the relationships of mothers and babies. There are also notable parallels between Esther Bick’s understanding of the acute anxieties of infancy (the fear of ‘falling to pieces’) and Bion’s understanding of the fragmented states of mind occurring in psychotic patients. Anna Freud was as dedicated as Melanie Klein to the analysis of children, and many of her principal contributions to psychoanalysis were based on this. Thus the theoretical advances of the 1940s and 1950s in the British psychoanalytic tradition could not have occurred without the priority given to the psychoanalysis of children, and the corpus of ideas and techniques with which British analysts now work can scarcely be imagined without that contribution.
