ABSTRACT
There is something in the very nature of psychoanalysis that seems to incline people to make Sigmund Freud into the archetypal, dogmatic parent, and make this an excuse for not really trying to understand what he was about. In Melanie Klein’s paper, “A child is being beaten”, Freud observes how frequently there is found to exist in the fantasy life of people coming to analysis for help with their neuroses and obsessions the exciting, masturbatory fantasy of a little child being beaten. The most important point is that the erotic enjoyment of the fantasy can be indulged in by setting up or provoking a situation of actually being beaten, and cultivating the delusion that one is the hated rival sibling. Klein originally thought that the mechanism of projective identification was an entirely defensive one, and involved the baby creating the illusion of taking over the mother and controlling her.
