ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights some of Sigmund Ch. Freud's fundamental views on the nature of psychological disorders and their origins in the emotional development of the child. The contributions of the pioneer child analysts, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, are discussed, showing how each developed and applied Freud's ideas to work with children in somewhat different ways. As long as Freud's analyses of his patients centred upon the memories of inner conflict and stress which the patient could readily recall from his recent past, little progress was made in alleviating neurotic symptoms. Conflict in the personality arises basically because of an inbuilt tension between opposing instinctual tendencies, which are partly biological and partly psychological in nature. Sometimes Freud expressed this conflict in a more modern idiom. Freud himself never aspired to be a psychoanalyst of children, however much his theories about adult neurosis and character formation entailed reference to early childhood origins.
