ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the fierce row that Klein faced in the 1920s over the analysis of young children—superficially a puzzle, since Klein had been encouraged to analyse pre-latency children by the psychoanalysts Ferenczi in Budapest and Abraham in Berlin. It gives a fresh evaluation of the contemporary politics, in-fighting, and theoretical and therapeutic challenges. Melanie Klein's first analyst was, as is well known, the Hungarian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, in Budapest. Klein described in retrospect what was to prove the spring-board for her career as the psychoanalyst of small children, when she was evidently hungering for a fulfilling career. Ferenczi's wartime service duties outside Budapest will have caused some interruptions to its continuity. Early child analysts were, of course, having to work out practice decades before the development of systemic family therapy, or of the practice in child psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the NHS in the UK of having a colleague work separately with the parent(s) or carer(s).
