ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein’s accumulated experience of seeing young children in analysis led her to the conclusion that anxiety originates in the fear of annihilation from within. This chapter considers two forms of anxiety described by Melanie Klein, together with the mind’s principal means of protection against them. It discusses a technical principle that she called the point of urgency, a concept helpful in considering moments of anxiety where timely interpretation is necessary to further the analytic process. Melanie Klein had a particular gift for understanding the anxieties and the unconscious mental life of small children. She placed the understanding of the anxiety of the infant and the child at the heart of her method. Klein suggested that the infant from the beginning of life is prone to suffer severe anxiety about its continuing existence, a dread that only the mother is able to alleviate.
