#child analysis

25th July 2025

In October 2025, the Melanie Klein Trust will be celebrating the centenary of Klein’s first visit to London, where she gave a compelling series of lectures to British analysts on what was then called ‘early analysis’. Having been teaching recently on child analysis myself, in my latest explorations around the archive I have been particularly alert to examples of Klein’s work with children.

Here I am sharing material from file B.97, which contains Klein’s notes on her work with an 11-year-old girl. Klein has titled these notes, ‘Rivalry and the wish to prove always that one knows better, as a defence against guilt’. This clinical record vividly shows how the interpretation of the patient’s rivalrous feelings – which are very active in relation to Klein – relieves the patient of a powerful need to compete with and put down her analyst. As a result of Klein’s interpretation, we see her patient’s superior attitude give way to greater friendliness and a wish to treat Klein fairly.

The notes record that, on the patient’s return after the summer break, Klein has given her a new box of bricks, larger than a previous box given to her after the Easter break. The girl is delighted. Later, it becomes clear that Klein feels the boxes and bricks stand for mother and her insides. Klein notes first, however, that,

With the smaller box of bricks, she had tried to fit them into her own pattern, and made a drawing of that; and she competed with me as to who could put them in better and quicker, and so on. Competition and the wish to beat are dominant in her relation with me. Now, when she had the new box, she again tried to fit… [the bricks] in another way, according to her own pattern, and did not manage to do so. There was one brick which she could not fit in, and she pretended that it did not belong to the box, but to some old bricks; though it was quite clear to her and to me that this was not true…This failure made her throw the bricks in the drawer – very unusual for her who is extremely tidy – and not to try again to put them into both boxes for some time. She had been quite friendly with me when she came back from the holidays, though it is one of her ways not to admit or to show great friendliness in her relation with me. [Image 1–2/41 in the digitised archive]

Following the patient’s failure to fit the bricks in the box, Klein notes that ‘more hostility comes in’. However, she also observes that, alongside this hostility, her patient demonstrates a strong wish to teach, as a means of giving something to Klein. Klein writes,

After this failure with the bricks, she started again to treat me in the way that a very nasty school teacher treats a child. She arranged competitions and physical exercises to which I only gave in to a certain degree, by which she wanted to prove that she can do them so much better – singing, which she knows I cannot do, and then different games with a ball, which she always, and often quite unfairly, tried to prove that she had won. It is characteristic of this attitude that at this time, she often tried to get a little advantage, and was not fair, changing the rules of the game when she felt she was losing, and so on. From this she went on to teach me the different names for the parts of horses, and what one does with horses. She knows a good deal about them. Again, all the time she was enjoying her superiority; but all the time, as well as superiority and hostility, the wish to teach me also came through. [2–3/41]

As so often in her writing, Klein clearly feels that it is crucial to note her patient’s loving and more constructive impulses in addition to her evident hostility. She refers to the girl’s family situation, having in mind how small her patient often feels in relation to her siblings and her parents:

In the competition over the ball game, I showed her that her wish, which appeared in many details, was to take the male position, and she was trying to compete with her two brothers, who had been rather domineering with her when she was small, showing her very much their superiority as boys. While I interpreted this, in connection with the ball games, her attitude in the game itself became fairer. (I also interpreted how unfair she had always found the advantage taken by the grown-ups and brothers of her; and also the wish to restore the mother – injured by the burning and sadistic penis, about which we had had much material in her analysis.) [4/41]

Klein’s young patient then turns her attention to repairing the holes in an old table in the play room, by filling them with plasticine. She tells Klein, rather imperiously, ‘Could you not really provide a new table?’ Next, she and Klein must mix different colours of plasticine in order to make just the right colour. She often blames Klein for not having mixed the colours in the right way, and becomes cross when her analyst falls short, or is untidy and wasteful. Klein records,

…she once smacked me on the hand, in a way quite unusual with her. I interpreted that she was taking the place of the nurse and I was representing herself as a baby, when she felt scolded and punished for making the bad faeces. [5/41]

The patient then begins to mould a head out of the plasticine, and to compete with Klein as to who can make a better one. Klein writes,

This head was first like the one of a baby, but then became one of a man. Her brother had been ill some weeks ago, and then, when she was actually distressed, she had also…made a head out of some material, in a rather greyish colour, which indicated the bad look of the brother. I now interpret that she [i]s competing with him in improving or putting right the babies and the brothers and the father, all of which she felt had been injured by making holes in the table. She herself had done a lot of cutting and making holes, [and] scratching into this table. After much detailed ways of mixing [of plasticine to fill the holes] – where I showed her that it was not only the question of mixing the faeces the right way so that they should not be dangerous, but also of the parents mixing their genitals in the right way – she proceeded, having become more and more friendly, to make drawings and to suggest that I should make drawings about the same subject, which she wanted to collect and stick into one note book. Both hers and mine should go in, and this whole hostile attitude of continuously proving that I was wrong had given way to a rather helpful and friendly attitude, in which she seemed quite keen that I should do it quite as well as she, making a special point that we would rather throw the whole thing away and start it all over again if it wasn’t good enough, because we did want to make this into a nice book and only full of nice pictures. [5–7/41]

Klein then reflects on the early part of the session, when her patient had been so distressed about not being able to put her new bricks in the box in the right way. Considering the meaning of this, she writes,

…[the child’s] feeling that she should fill up mother’s inside in the right way, giving her back everything that she had taken… and the despair she felt when she could not fill in the box in the way she thought she should… had driven her to prove continually that I was wrong, that she knew all about it, and that she could take on the role of the strict mother to me, while she was continuously a strict mother. [7/41]

As usual, Klein’s notes are extremely detailed, so I am picking out only a few elements, but readers can study them in their entirety on the Wellcome Collection website.

I shall end for now by noting that, in addition to the new boxes of bricks, Klein has responded to her patient’s request for new materials by providing her with a new notebook. This they can fill up together, now that the patient’s rivalry has subsided. It is fascinating to see how readily Klein responds to her patient’s wish, though, as usual, she interprets fully alongside this. She writes,

13th March 2023

This is the third in a series of blog posts addressing the subject of technique. In my previous two posts I shared material from file D.3 of the archive, called ‘Notes on interpretation, notes on defences’. Here, I share another handful of illuminating fragments from the same file. Again, Klein speaks about interpretation, the patient’s resistance or reaction to it, and of the ‘synthesising’ action of analytic work.

This wasn’t a term I was familiar with from Klein’s writing, nor one which is in regular usage these days, as far as I know. However, it does appear in a number of Klein’s later papers, including in ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’ (1946), and ‘On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt’ (1948). In this latter paper Klein writes that, ‘the basis of depressive anxiety is the synthesis between destructive impulses and feelings of love towards one object’ (p.35). Klein gives an example of synthesis in the notes I reproduce below, and I have also included an excerpt from her work with Richard, from her 1961 Narrative of a Child Analysis, which illustrates it well.

Firstly though, returning to the matter of finding the right balance between interpreting and allowing material to flow, Klein writes that it takes,

…much experience and constant vigilance even later on not to err in this respect. We have to ask ourselves over and over again whether now is the right moment for interpretation, [or] whether what we have seen now as an important point should not be allowed to pass to gather more material. On the other hand, in doing so we might miss a juncture at which interpretation, by relieving anxiety, brings out further and more important material still. This is one of the many points in technique where every analyst has to find his own way; but none of them I think should not again and again retrace his steps and allow himself to try occasionally other possibilities. (PP/KLE/D.3; Image 5-7/85)

Demonstrating just this sort of vigilance in her own work, Klein reflects upon receiving criticism from colleagues. Somewhat amusingly, she insists that she has seriously considered this criticism, while simultaneously making it clear she feels it was wrong:

I have often made good use of criticism which, though it had missed the mark, made me try over and over again [to think about] whether certain things I was criticised for could not contain some truth. (Image 9/85)

Then, regarding the patient’s resistance to interpretation, she writes:

The patient might for unconscious reasons want to stop the analyst in speaking and thus not give him [an] opening [to interpret]… [In this case,] probably the most important thing is to find out why the patient must either talk so much or cannot bear the analyst’s interpretations. That means that besides the actual material he is dealing with and which he might interpret, [the analyst] must not lose sight of this general way of resistance. (Image 43/85)

Klein highlights one possible reason why a patient may experience an interpretation as an attack. She says that, on occasion,

…the content of the material presented is of such a nature that instant and dangerous punishment is awaited. The first feeling when the analyst opens his mouth is that now the scolding or the pronouncement of the judgement has come. (Image 46/85)

Klein turns next to ‘synthesis’, and she uses a vignette to illustrate this:

Synthesis is equated to bringing to life or fighting deadness. But the way it is done by interpretation is sometimes to collect parts of the personality which seem not to be there anymore and which we guess from this bit, and that bit…

Instance: the dream where the dreamer urgently wanted to see what was at the moment her best object [friend]. She [the friend] had a party and did not want to see the dreamer. And everything depended on her [the dreamer] being able at least for a little while to see that person before she undertook some essential thing which all amounted to trying to find herself again. The good object (the person giving the party) stood for one part of herself and she was desperately trying to bring herself together. If she could not find that part, she could not achieve her objective. [My] interpretation was that this [friend] was herself and this was the part [of her] she was struggling to find. Yet she was saying in the analysis that nothing of her was there, that nothing had any meaning, that interpretations had no meaning. But the particular person she chose as the best part of herself had all the qualities which she felt would help her both to re-integrate herself and a good relation with me. That person was not over ambitious, did her job well, was exactly the part of herself which she should find. (Image 49/85)

Further connecting the synthesising function of interpretation to the life instinct, Klein comments:

The analyst’s work in synthesising implies that in the struggle between [the] life and death instincts, which underlies all mental processes, he strengthens the life instinct, the expression of which is synthesis. Insofar as analytic procedure strengthens the derivatives, namely, libido, love and hope, it serves the purposes of the life instinct in its polarity with the death instinct. (Image 83/85)

In her 1961 Narrative of a Child Analysis, Klein discusses synthesis in relation to her child patient Richard. She writes:

It is an essential part of psychoanalytic therapy…that the patient should be enabled by the analyst’s interpretations to integrate the split-off and contrasting aspects of his self; this implies also the synthesis of the split-off aspects of other people and of situations. Such progress in synthesis and integration during an analysis, while giving relief, also brings up anxiety. For the patient is bound to experience the persecutory and depressive anxieties, which were largely responsible for the tendency to split, splitting being one of the fundamental defences against persecutory and depressive anxiety. (p.77)

Klein gives an example from Richard’s ninth session, illustrating her use of interpretation to help him integrate aspects of his mother. She records that,

Richard chose a country on the map to speak about; this time Germany. He said he wanted to whack Hitler and to attack Germany. Then he decided to ‘choose’ France instead. He spoke about France, which betrayed Britain but might not have been able to help it, and he was sorry for France.

Mrs K. pointed out that there were various kinds of Mummy in his mind: the bad Mummy, Germany, whom he wanted to attack in order to destroy Hitler inside her; the injured, and not-so-good Mummy whom he still loved, represented by France; when they came together in his mind, he could not bear to attack Germany, and rather turned to France for whom he could allow himself to feel sorry. (p.49)

Interpretation, which so often aims at the integration or synthesis of objects or the self, may produce guilt and depressive anxiety, Klein remarks in her notes to this session (ibid.). Indeed, she records that Richard soon begins to pick up books, ‘but without interest and seems lost in thought’ (ibid.)

-------------------

References:

Klein, M (1961) Narrative of a Child Analysis: The conduct of the psycho-analysis of children as seen in the treatment of a ten-year-old boy. Vintage.

Klein, M (1946) ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’. In Envy and Gratitude and other works 1946-1963 (1975/1997). Vintage.

17th February 2020

After several years’ delving through the Melanie Klein archive at the Wellcome Library, and working with other researchers doing the same, I have edited and contributed to a book of critical reflections on this rich store. It is scheduled for publication by Routledge at the end of February (you can order a copy here!).

Although I missed the opportunity to do this in the book itself, I would here like to dedicate it to the memory of Dr Elizabeth Bott Spillius (1924-2016), a distinguished psychoanalyst who did so much to explore the Klein archives, and to open them up for future generations.

In the first section of the book, ‘In Klein’s own words’, I am particularly pleased to be publishing four of Klein’s ‘lay’ lectures for the first time. These were given to educationalists and child guidance workers at conferences in the 1930s. While the style of her academic and clinical papers can sometimes be rather dense, Klein is always clear and lively in the lectures she wrote for non-analytically trained audiences. These four are no exception. We see her here at the height of her creative powers, while she was evolving her central ideas of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. She offers some lovely clinical examples – often taken from her work with children – and expounds her ideas as they apply to ‘the difficult child’, children having problems at school, or those attending child guidance clinics. She also describes the fundamentals of her play technique and, among other things, her interesting disagreements with her contemporary, the paediatrician and educator Maria Montessori. Importantly, Klein’s lectures illustrate how her work differs from traditional non-interpretive ‘play therapy’.

The first part of the book also reproduces Klein’s autobiography in its most complete form (it was left unfinished at the time of her death in 1960). Until now, this version has appeared only on the Melanie Klein Trust website, after it was discovered by chance in analyst Roger Money-Kyrle’s archive. Alongside the autobiography is a recently unearthed letter from 1955, written by Klein to fellow analyst Elliott Jaques. Written after a conference at which Klein was warmly received (somewhat to her surprise), she movingly expresses to her colleague and friend some renewed optimism about the survival of her ideas.

The second half of the book, ‘Studies from the Melanie Klein archive’ contains papers based on studies of the archive by four Klein scholars. Claudia Frank’s three papers were previously only available in German and have been translated into English for this book; four other papers (three by Robert Hinshelwood and one by me) have appeared in various journals. The final paper is the result of an exciting piece of research carried out by Maria Rhode, commissioned especially for this publication.

Claudia Frank, already well known for her meticulous and illuminating study of Klein’s early work with children in Berlin (Frank, 2000), writes fascinatingly about how, immediately before and during the war years, Klein used her patients’ references to Hitler to understand the interaction between the internal and external world. Frank also explores unpublished material of Klein’s on the topic of reassurance, and her psychoanalytic study of the character Don Juan as he is represented in a play by Obey, which Klein saw in 1934.

Bob Hinshelwood, distinguished for his many contributions to Klein scholarship (Hinshelwood, 1989, 1994 and elsewhere) has contributed three chapters to this collection. They examine Klein’s contribution to the concept of ‘internal objects’, and how this was taken up in the British Psychoanalytical Society; Klein’s rare but important use of the concept of repression; and, finally, Klein’s complex, ambivalent relationship to the clinical usefulness of countertransference, which gained ground in psychoanalytic thinking from the 1950s.

My own chapter looks at the material Klein collected while she was writing her final (posthumously published) paper, ‘On Loneliness’. I found exploring this material both interesting and moving, and hope that my readers will too.

Finally, Maria Rhode, who has written widely on autism from a psychoanalytic perspective (Rhode, 2003, 2004) has studied Klein’s later material relating to ‘Dick’. ‘Dick’ was the small child who formed the basis of Klein’s seminal 1930 paper, ‘The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego’. The archives reveal how Klein continued to see Dick from time to time, at problematic moments in his development, until he was almost an adult. Rhode draws on poignant material showing both the ways in which Dick was able, with analytic help, to succeed in his development, and the considerable difficulties that persisted for him. Rhode places this material within the modern context of psychoanalytic research into the autistic spectrum. These are current ideas to which Klein had no access, yet Rhode shows how, even then, she was noticing things that would only much later be fully conceptualised by analysts like Frances Tustin.

---------------

References:

Frank. C. (2009) Melanie Klein in Berlin: Her First Psychoanalyses of Children. Routledge.

Hinshelwood, R.D. (1989) A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. Free Association Books.

Hinshelwood, R.D. (1994) Clinical Klein. Free Association Books.

Klein, M. (1930). ‘The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego’. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 11:24-39.

Milton, J (2020) (Ed.) Essential Readings from the Melanie Klein Archive: Original Papers and Critical Reflections. London: Routledge.

Rhode, M. (2003) (Ed. with Rustin, M., Dubinsky A. and Dubinsky, H.) Psychotic States in Children. Karnac.

8th January 2020

There are some files in the Melanie Klein archive that are hard to categorise, as they appear to have been compiled from a miscellany of notes that do not always cohere. Perhaps they simply ended up, for one reason or another, in the same pile of papers in Klein’s office at the time of her death. Some pages are repeated several times, with or without editing. Such files can be frustrating to study and make sense of, yet they are often well worth the effort. PP/KLE/D.26 is one such file, and consists of 96 separate sheets (presented as numbered images in the Wellcome Library’s digital file). The time of creation is not clear, but in image 1 there is a reference to ‘post war’, suggesting that at least some of the pages were written after 1945.

In the Wellcome catalogue, file D.26 is part of a series (D.23-27) entitled ‘Notes for possible books or papers’. This is not exactly specific, and the individual heading for D.26 is equally general: ‘Notes on various topics (older versions of paper) Extra Material. Lecture 11 Early Situation. Lecture 1 Internalisation. Mother and Baby Situation. Love and Reparation.’

Some of the papers mentioned in this rather unwieldy heading probably formed part of a lecture series on child analysis, which was given to training candidates at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Also in this file are extracts from the first of Klein’s ‘Lectures on Technique’ (these can be found in full in files C.52 and C.53, and were published by John Steiner in 2017).

I have honed in on two themes from this disparate collection that I think are worth noting: first, Klein’s emphasis on the importance of the interaction of innate unconscious phantasy with actual experience of the external world (the environment), beginning in earliest infancy. There are many other examples of this throughout Klein’s work, noted by Elizabeth Bott Spillius and colleagues in The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought under: ‘External world/environment’. 

Second, I have extracted passages in which Klein describes what she perceives as the different strivings of men and women, based on differing unconscious preoccupations. Her emphasis in these notes is mostly on women.

Although little, if any, of the material here is newly discovered (or rediscovered), it is always stimulating to read through Klein’s rough notes, before they were edited and polished into complete papers.

(The following notes are found online as Wellcome image numbers 42-43, followed by 46. These are typed pages with corrections and additions in Klein’s handwriting.)

The interaction of unconscious phantasy with the infant’s experience.

The environmental influence – to begin with the attitude of the mother and the detailed ways in which she nurses the baby and looks after him – is of great importance for the building up of his phantasies, and thus also for his present and future object relations. Her love and care will from the very beginning help him to develop towards phantasies of a pleasant kind and to the development of more good and helpful images, and also give him more support against his early anxiety situations. Lack of understanding on the part of mother or nurse on the other hand will work in the opposite direction and reinforce the development of persecution phantasies. But to a certain though varying degree, persecution phantasies will be experienced by the infant and dangerous internal and external objects will become active in his mind, even if the mother is perfectly loving. Sadistic phantasies and impulses and the anxieties to which they give rise spring from intrapsychic sources. They are influenced by the environmental factor but can never be eliminated. Also, no matter how loving the mother is, frustrations there are and must be from the moment of delivery from the womb, and they all go towards the development of aggressive phantasies and the building up of persecuting imagos, as do the various bodily sensations and unpleasant internal and external stimuli which the baby experiences from birth onwards. But if we could imagine for a moment a child without aggressive phantasies, and thus also without persecution phantasies, we should soon realise that the aggressive impulses, and even anxieties of various kinds, are not only of high importance for the whole of development, but even stimulate and promote it if they are not too strong. Needless to say the less anxiety a child goes through the better. There is always enough, (I daresay too much) to stimulate the development.

Summing up, I should say that phantastic imagos are the result of the child’s phantasy life and instinctual urges, on the one hand, and of internal and external stimuli and real frustrations and deprivations and the people in the child’s environment on the other. One can be sure that in every case all these elements come into play in varying degrees. The point I want to stress here is, that there exists in the infant, side by side with his relations to real objects – but on a different plane as it were – relations to his phantastic imagos. These two kinds of object relations intermingle and colour each other in the course of development, and the first steps in this direction occur when the child gets to know his mother as a whole and loved person, which is roughly between the ages of three to five months.

The partial realisation that the loved objects and the hated ones, the real people and the imaginary figures, both external and internal, are somehow bound up with each other, compels the ego to unify its imagos to some extent. Having made these crucial and extremely painful steps, and having then arrived at a plane nearer to reality, the ego takes at once recourse to some mechanisms which are of fundamental importance for the relation to our objects and for mental economy in general. The ego splits again its imagos into loved and hated, i.e. into good and dangerous ones, at the same time projecting its internalized objects into the external world, and thus distributing both its anxiety and its libido again onto real objects. By attaching his hate and anxiety to some people and his love to others the child is able to gain more trust in some people. Since at the time he introjects these good objects, also his belief in the figures he feels to be inside him becomes strengthened. A successful interplay of these processes leads to a mitigation of the dangerousness of the imagos, which in turn enables the ego to make further steps towards their unification. But this unification is always bound to certain limits. Even in the normal grown up mind there remain operative, to a certain extent, internal and external objects which have, as it were, an independent existence of their own, and which become active as soon as hate is [the sentence is interrupted here and the rest is found in image 82, as follows:] stirred up by frustrations and anxiety is increased for internal or external reasons.

Notes on female and male strivings

[Image 1: this is written in pencil by Klein on a fragment of paper]

The selfish relation of the mother to her children. Also protection in another sense by satisfying her vanity, possessions etc.

[Image 10: typed; begins mid-sentence and seems to be a continuation from a previous lost page]

mother – in which means having one’s desires and needs satisfied and receiving protection – persists too strongly into adult life, then the woman’s relation to the man will also have something of this character. This kind of relationship in which love mainly consists in receiving love, satisfaction, admiration and protection from the man is by no means rare nowadays, although, owing to the alterations in social and economic conditions it is less obvious than in pre-war days.

[Image 11: typed]

Capacity to detach oneself sufficiently from the early ties has the effect of allowing one to grow up, because then new relationships will not simply be built on the pattern of the old one – which implies that the feelings of guilt towards the parents are not so strong. E.g. if a daughter develops to her husband a relationship which is not just a repetition of the one she wanted to have with her father she will feel that she has not just taken away her mother’s husband, she can feel equal to her mother, the childish situation diminishes, and gives way to a situation of equality which is adequate for a grown- up relation.

[Image 15: typed with Klein’s annotations in pencil]

Notes.

Any work which gives satisfaction

For the woman, any work which has to do with the house, with the garden, with writing a book, - all that has to do with reparation of mother’s body, creation of babies etc.

Activity of men – all things connected with penis

Feminine in man and masculine in woman.

Relation to external – work with other people, and doing something which is felt to be good for the whole organisation

[Images 17-18: typed with Klein’s corrections and annotations]

The woman’s feelings of love and her urge to make restoration play an important part in her sublimations and activities. Her interests, in her domestic life, or in creative work of any kind, though this may be undertaken for loved people and will have their real values, are largely influenced by her urge to produce babies, to take care of them and thus also to restore what in her phantasies she has injured.

In her phantasies, the house, with all its details, the garden, with the flowers she grows, or a book she might write stand also for her own body and her mother’s body, and her activity and creativeness are thus influenced by her wish to make restoration, which, as we know, is partly due to an interaction between love and hate.

The interests and the creativeness of the man find expression, as we know, in somewhat different ways. They are directed mainly towards the external world, although of course there are similarities between his and the woman’s type of productiveness in so far as he has feminine traits. The fact that his activities and interests are in general more concerned with external things has to do with the part he plays in procreation, in which he gives out what the woman takes in.

Now in his phantasies which originate in early childhood, and in which the interactions of feelings of love and hate and the urge to restore play an important part, his genital comes to stand for all creative power, and becomes linked up with all constructive tendencies and capacities.

What I have just said is of course not an attempt at an explanation of the most complex phenomena of the work and sublimations of [stops abruptly here]

[Images 26-28: typed with Klein’s handwritten corrections and additions]

The importance of this world established inside the self is much greater with the woman than with the man, for the very reason that it is inside her body that the important reproductive processes go on by which the child is received and developed. In the little girl’s phantasies…the inside of her body is full of people and things and feelings of a good and of a destructive kind, and she is unconsciously deeply concerned with the state of this world… Babies play a most important part in this phantasy world. In the little girl’s phantasies her mother’s inside is full of babies, put into it by the father’s penis. But since phantasies are felt to be real to the child, she also possesses babies inside her, and they are the babies which she wants to receive from her father, and thus in her phantasy has actually received. She cherishes these babies as the very best things in her inside, and thus become for her the proof of goodness and value in herself. This of course can only be explained by the fact that the woman’s unconscious relation to the inside of her body is of this very special kind that I have described.

The great importance that women attach to their bodies is in this way misleading. Their deepest unconscious interests, their concern, their love and anxiety are focussed on the world inside themselves, and particularly on the baby which they contain – first it is in phantasy and then in reality. These factors contribute greatly to the strength of the feelings the woman has towards the child growing inside her and to the baby to which she has given birth. Besides all the things which I have already mentioned, the fact that this baby stands as a test for the goodness of her internal world has a fundamental influence on her relation to her actual child.

It is well known that as soon as a mother has given suck to her child her feelings towards it deepen. Because out of her body she produces the very good stuff which is essential for the child’s needs and gratification and which provides the means of its growth… But in giving suck she also plays as it were her mother’s part, who is now in her phantasy again having a child to love and to take care of and she thus recreates the old family situation. In this way she makes reparation in her mind for her past aggressive and jealous phantasies in which she robbed her mother of children. But in addition to this she shares her child’s pleasure, by returning in phantasy back to her own babyhood. She thus reverses the relationship of mother and child and experiences a happy renewal of her early attachment to her mother and improves on it.

[Image 30: extract]

The woman has desired a baby from her very earliest days, and the gratification of at last having it relieves the pain of the old frustrations and of the old grievance that she has been denied it. This tends to reduce her aggressive impulses, and thus allows her more possibilities for loving her child.

[Image 31: extract]

…all the mother’s good and constructive tendencies now have scope. The gratification of being able to love, which is closely connected with the relief of the sense of guilt, [stops abruptly here]

[Image 33]

I mentioned before that in a way the woman is recreating the old family situation, but is recreating it in a happy way. Thus she is making up to her mother for having injured or robbed her of her babies out of jealousy and envy; and since the child also stands for the woman’s own brothers and sisters, which as a child she had also attacked in her aggressive phantasies, the brothers and sisters also, when she loves her baby and takes care of it, are restored and put right.

References

Spillius, E. Bott et al (2011) The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Routledge. (See entry entitled, ‘External world/environment’.)