ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of premature ego development was first introduced in Melanie Klein’s (1930) seminal paper on the importance of the symbol forming function of the mind. In this chapter, the author introduces several developments in modern, post-Kleinian thinking since the publication of that paper, which can be seen as offshoots of or complements to Melanie Klein’s work. Klein introduced the concept of “precocious ego development” to sum up Dick”s dilemma. Although Klein had posited the existence of an ego from birth, and even before that in utero, in this work she made an important discrimination between normal healthy ego development on the one hand and premature pathological ego development on the other. In her paper “On the importance of symbol-formation in the development of the ego,” Klein presented findings from the analysis of a four-year-old boy that she called Dick. Indeed, Klein noted that amongst Dick’s symptoms was the development of a “premature defense against sadism”.
