ABSTRACT
Klein’s recognition of the intensity of the child’s desire to understand him- or herself, the other people who mattered in their worlds and indeed the world itself was one of her most original contributions. The origin of this strand in her work is often located in the extraordinary paper about ‘Dick’, an autistic boy she encountered and wrote about in her 1930 paper (‘The importance of symbol-formation in the development of the ego’). But her interest in the child’s natural curiosity (the curiosity which, after all, enables Lewis Carroll’s Alice (Empson, 1935) to manage and survive her bewildering experiences in dream-Wonderland) links in a deep way with her investigation of the growth of the mind in her early papers. She was convinced that a psychoanalytic attitude to children should embrace their cognitive development. She had a profound love and respect for the child’s mind in its intellectual, social, moral and aesthetic dimensions.
