ABSTRACT
This chapter uses Rita's case—first as described in the publications and then as illuminated by the treatment records—to examine Klein's experiences of the types of play a very young child used in sessions, challenges of management and enactment, the appropriate type of setting and framework, and management of relations with parents. The treatment notes allow us to see, in some detail, the problems that Klein faced in her task, and the means she evolved to tackle the challenge of translating adult analysis for the world of the small, often very infantile child. The notes also provide a glimpse of what it was like to be in the room with Rita, with scenes and episodes that are replicated in the treatments of highly disturbed small children in child psychoanalytic psychotherapy today. Rita's unconscious, cannibalistic, murderous phantasies against Klein and her mother are well documented in the treatment notes.
