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Melanie Klein Play Technique

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Melanie Klein’s Psychoanalytic Play technique Its significance in understanding early states of mind.

Melanie Klein was a very charismatic woman with style and flair and passion. Whereas Sigmund Freud was known to be a fantastic theorist, Klein on the other hand was known to be a fantastic clinician. It was through her clinical study, by observing her patients, both verbally and non-verbally, was she able to come up with her own theories some of which contradicted ideas of both Sigmund and Ana Freud. Clinical study was where she developed a technique for analyzing children as young as two years old something that was relatively unheard of in 1919. This is when Melanie Klein took on her first child analysis. No one in the early years of Psychoanalysis had dared take on young children; patients who like their adult counterparts were suffering from neurosis, acute anxiety, and other disturbances, which inhibited them in their daily lives, primarily because the belief was that it was dangerous to the child and also that psychoanalysis was for children from the latency period onwards. The latency period was believed to take place around five years old. Melanie Klein was a pioneer in child psychoanalysis and it was through the development of what she termed the Psychoanalytic Play Technique that she was able to find a way that was child friendly, which she felt could free up the child in a space that allowed such freedom through play for her to uncover and alleviate the disturbances of young minds. (Klein, M. 1955. Pp 35-36)
A brief history
There were a few early cases that were very significant in the development of Klein’s technique and she notes them in her paper on the Psychoanalytic Play Technique. The first being the case of Fritz a boy of five years old who suffered acute anxiety and defenses against them which she witnessed in his play. She relieved Fritz

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