ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein pioneered the psychoanalysis of very young children and in her accounts of their play she describes their intense preoccupation with their parents’ sexuality and with their own. In the Kleinian view there is not only a readiness to apprehend parental sexuality but a phantasy in the child that parental sexuality is always associated with conception and the possibility of new babies. The child’s own destructiveness and consequent fears of retaliation are projected onto the father and the child is arrested in the situation of having to protect mother and to see male sexuality as bad. Klein’s linking of the depressive position with the negotiation of the Oedipus complex has been particularly clearly elaborated by Ronald Britton in “The Missing Link: Parental Sexuality in the Oedipus Complex”. The origins of the Superego are, in Klein’s view, laid down in the earliest paranoid-schizoid relation to the breast and are in the girl just as formidable as in the boy.
