ABSTRACT
From the beginning of her work Melanie Klein was impressed by the intensity of the child's anxiety, both conscious and unconscious, and by her need to use violent mechanisms of defence. Investigating children, Melanie Klein discovered what was already repressed in the child – namely the infant. Klein agrees with Karl Abraham's opinion that the points of fixation of psychotic illness lie in the oral and early anal phase of development, but she goes further than that. She finds in the child's psychoanalytic material evidence that these fears persist, and considers that the infantile neurosis itself is a defence structure against an anxiety situation which is of a psychotic nature. Psychoanalytic theory usually develops in the opposite direction to the development of the individual: the study of the adult neurosis led S. Freud to discover the child in the adult; the study of children led Mrs Klein to the infant in the child.
