ABSTRACT
In the chapter on Technique of Early Analysis' in The Psycho-Analysis of Children, Melanie Klein gives the following simple example to illustrate the symbolism of the child's play and her technique in analysing it. When Melanie Klein arrived in London in 1927, her technique of child analysis, which she called play analysis, was fully worked out. Melanie Klein herself gave a short account of her technique in a paper presented in 1946 to the British Psychological Society. Melanie Klein held that the child's play expresses its preoccupations, conflicts and phantasies, and her technique consisted in analysing the play exactly as one analyses dreams and free associations, interpreting phantasies, conflicts and defences. In the development of psychoanalysis there is an intimate relation between theory and technique. It was the technique of hypnosis that enabled S. Freud to discover the unconscious process.
