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This course has already taken place, originally broadcast on 24 and 25 February 2021. Registrants will receive access to the recording and the course material for 30 days.
- Session 1: 3 hours, 33 min
- Session 2: 3 hours, 45 min
Melanie Klein was a pioneer of child psychoanalysis whose radically new way of working with children brought her into sharp conflict with Freud’s daughter Anna – also a pioneer in the field. But ultimately her understanding of infancy and childhood, derived from her work with her young patients (as well as with adults), enabled her to create a powerful new version of psychoanalytic theory that took psychoanalysis completely beyond Freud, and marked the beginning of the Object Relations school. Klein’s writings contain a profound vision of the human condition, and we will examine its implications for psychotherapy and for society. We will also study the development of her ideas by Wilfred Bion.
Session 1: We will explore the different approaches of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein to the psychoanalysis of children, and study Klein’s psychoanalytic play technique which sees children’s play as representing (and therefore communicating) their emotional conflicts and anxieties in symbolic form. This will lead to an examination of the Kleinian notion of ‘unconscious phantasy’.
Session 2: We will explore Klein’s mature theory of the human condition, based on her understanding of psychological development in the first year of life, which she sees as laying the foundation of the personality. We will examine her notions of the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’, the ‘depressive position’, the ‘manic defences’, reparation, and the fundamental importance of envy and gratitude.
We will explore the application of Kleinian insights to the understanding of society and art, and review the standing of Kleinian psychoanalysis today, and its relationship to the other main schools. We also relate Klein’s work to the contributions of two of her most important and creative psychoanalytic contemporaries: Ronald Fairbairn and Wilfred Bion.
