ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein discussed the development of symbolic capacity in her famous 1930 paper ‘The importance of symbol-formation for the development of the ego’. Klein used the case of a 4-year-old boy she called ‘Dick’ to show severe impairment of symbolic capacity; today we would think of Dick as being on the autistic spectrum. Klein managed to reach the boy through child analysis, analysing his anxiety and mobilizing his capacity for attachment. The author has been given access to material in the Melanie Klein Archives at the Wellcome Library describing further analysis of Dick over a number of years. Maria Rhode describes Klein’s technique and conceptualizations about Dick and presents the material in the context of later psychoanalytic work on autism.
