ABSTRACT
The theory and practice of psychoanalysis were first introduced by Sigmund Freud at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries as a method of treating mental illness. He constructed his original theory of psychoanalysis from studying the hidden psychological origins of various somatic symptoms in his patients that were neither explained by physical medicine nor responded to the conventional medical treatments of the time. Melanie Klein applied Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis to the practice of child analysis. She recognized the role of play in the analysis of children, where play in a child may be thought of as the communication equivalent of free association in an adult. The teachings, theories, and work of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Anna Freud, and maybe Donald Winnicott also, may, in many ways, seem remote and removed from the experiences and difficulties of children and families in an inner city, multi-cultural, contemporary, twenty-first century world.
