ABSTRACT
From before the First World War, Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth was evolving a practice of psychoanalytically applied principles to treat children. The paper, republished here, by the first non-Jew to become a member of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society, proposed certain principles for child analysis. In subsequent years both Anna Freud and Melanie Klein mined Hug-Hellmuth's writings. Anna Freud tended to observe the more cautious principles, no doubt reinforced after Hug-Hellmuth's death. Hug-Hellmuth's death and the seismic tremor it created in the psychoanalytic world, together with her stiff, retiring personality, consigned her to an undeserved oblivion. The dispute over the correct method of child analysis was never resolved. Instead it evolved as Klein introduced new ideas into psychoanalysis, such as the depressive position, internal objects, and unconscious phantasy from birth. It erupted as a conflict over the progress of psychoanalytic ideas in general during the 1940s, after the Freud family had fled the Nazis and arrived in London.
