ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein began her psychoanalytic career working with children, and she discovered most of her innovative contributions to psychoanalysis. According to Jean-Michel Petot, she was surprised that her colleagues found her ideas controversial. Klein's pioneering work mapping the mental terrain of infants and young children led her to enduring theories about the nature of personality development, anxiety, defences, unconscious phantasy, and analytic technique. Throughout her writings Klein was careful to connect her ideas to those of her predecessors. In Budapest, Klein had access to the kind of intellectual and cultural life she had known in Vienna. Klein began her work with children in Berlin using the same principles and methods analysts used with adults–the couch and free association. Klein's theories were rooted in the idea that bodily sensations, the phantasies accompanying them, and phantasies about the mother's body are the foundations of all experience.
