- This event has passed.
Melanie Klein was a pioneer of child psychoanalysis.
Her 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. We will examine Klein’s profound vision of the human condition, and we’ll begin to look at the related work of Ronald Fairbairn and Wilfred Bion.
Course layout :
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.
Session 2: Klein’s mature theory of the human condition will be the focus of this session. We’ll examine her principal ideas, including her theories of the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’, the ‘depressive position’, the ‘manic defences’, reparation, and the fundamental importance of envy and gratitude.
Session 3: We will see how Kleinian insights can be applied to our understanding of society and art, and review the position of Kleinian psychoanalysis today. We also relate Klein’s work to the contributions of two of her most important and creative psychoanalytic contemporaries: Ronald Fairbairn and Wilfred Bion.
