ABSTRACT
In her earliest work Klein was very much interested in the epistemophilic instinct and in the way children's anxieties interfered with their intellectual curiosity (Klein 1921, 1928). Her investigation of these anxieties, which she thought were basically caused by phantasies of exploring the inside of the mother's body and destroying its contents, led her on to the work she reported in The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932). After that she gave no further attention to the idea of an epistemophilic instinct and, with the exception of one paper on symbolism, she did not make thinking and disorders of thought a central theme of her later work, at least not explicitly. But two of her ideas were important starting points of later work on thinking. One was her theory about symbols (1930), the second the idea of projective identification (1946). Her idea about symbols is that interest in the original object, the mother's body, is repressed and displaced to objects in the external world. If anxiety about the mother's body is too acute because of phantasied attacks upon it, no displacement takes place and symbol formation comes to a standstill.
