ABSTRACT
Klein’s first paper, read to the Hungarian Psycho-analytical Society in 1919, was entitled ‘The development of a child’. The theme of development is therefore signalled at the outset of her career as at the heart of her interest and her approach to psychoanalysis. It is obvious that this is profoundly linked to her personal and family circumstances at that time. She had begun an analysis with Ferenczi in the context of unhappiness in her marriage and an as-yet uncharted professional path for herself. She had three children, with whose individual personalities and development she was intensely involved. Living with and thinking about them seems to have been a huge stimulus to detailed observation and reflection on their day-to-day preoccupations, their thoughts and the whole direction and shape of their mental lives. Her analysis no doubt opened her up to all sorts of questions about her own life as a child and the way in which she had arrived at this juncture in her life. Ferenczi’s encouragement of her interest in children’s minds and the possibilities for psychoanalytic investigation and intervention with young children must have drawn on his awareness of her unusual capacities for combining tender interest and rigorous enquiry in her relationships with children. The wider historical context possibly played a part too: just as the later story of post-1945 child psychoanalysis in Britain was deeply influenced by the post-war hopes of a better world and the particular emphasis on improved education and health for children (the 1944 Education Act and the launch of the National Health Service in 1948), so perhaps the concern with understanding early development, which Ferenczi embraced with enthusiasm, and which Klein found again with Abraham when she moved to Berlin in 1921, had its roots not only in the evolution of psychoanalysis but also in the intellectual response to the horrors of the First World War.
