ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein’s early papers about analysing children record her recognition of the need to find a technique appropriate to the child’s natural forms of communication and activity. Checking informally with colleagues and also consulting a recent audit of the intensive cases seen by child psychotherapy students undertaking the Tavistock training confirmed this picture. Children with such damaging early experiences tend to have difficulties in symbolic activity. The remembered dream has the particular potential for expanding the mind’s awareness of itself, for being used as an aid to thought and insight whether within or outside an analytic setting. Very small children’s play often reveals their conviction of their omnipotent powers to control their world and their objects. Symbolic play functions as a bridge between phantasy and external reality and its elaboration and interpretation in child analysis is one central way in which the analyst helps to support the growth of the child’s capacity to think.
