ABSTRACT
The Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961) puts one in touch with many aspects of Klein’s way of working with child patients and reveals the complexity of the task of understanding the connections between her clinical observations and her theoretical development. It also highlights why interpretations of the fundamentals of her technique can be so diverse. The widespread belief in her lack of interest in the external facts of a child’s life, in her excessive interest in destructive aggression, in her harshly challenging approach to interpretation and in a narrowing focus on the transference relationship is not sustainable from the texts. Yet it is not difficult to see why many readers become overwhelmed by the descriptions she offers of the internal dynamics of the distressed child’s world and the rigour of her analytic exploration of the sources of anxiety. Particularly for those not familiar with encountering the extreme passions of early childhood it is disturbing territory – although we have all been children, not many of us have easy access to our early emotional life. If we become parents we certainly come up against these realities afresh, and in our own lives are likely to have periods of turbulence which reverberate at an infantile level, but the resistance to acknowledging the intensity of childhood anxieties remains profound, even though twenty-first-century child-rearing practices and understandings of children’s mental capacities are substantially changed from the prevailing assumptions at the time of Klein’s writing.
