ABSTRACT

Melanie Klein and W. R. D. Fairbairn have introduced new concepts that are at variance with Anna Freud's theories of normal and abnormal mental life. This chapter provides the theories of Klein and Fairbairn, the clinical phenomena on which they are based, and the principal features of their therapeutic methods. There is general agreement that the source of Melanie Klein's theoretical concepts of healthy and pathological mental life is the work of Karl Abraham with whom she was in analysis in Berlin in the 1920s. Melanie Klein's theories are derived from her psychoanalytic work with young children who suffered from night terrors, phobias, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and disturbances of sleep and excretion. Fairbairn has derived the explanatory and developmental concepts that comprise his theory of object relations from patients whose symptomatology and behaviour differed significantly from those suffering from the neuroses. The history of psychoanalytic technique reveals the influence of psychoanalytic theories on the therapeutic method itself.