Book, Melanie Klein 1[LS]

Freud's work has been elucidated for more than twenty years by works that described and reconstituted its author's self-analysis; the stages of his discovery of psychoanalysis, the formation of his concepts and vocabulary. Melanie Klein, creator of child psychoanalysis through the technique of play, is, after Freud, the author of the most important clinical and theoretical discoveries in psychoanalysis, and her work has not benefited to date from such historical and epistemological elucidation. In this work, we witness the emergence of Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic vocation: it is the attempt she makes, in 1919, to educate her youngest son according to the principles of psychoanalysis, which she has just begun with Ferenczi. Quickly, the educational project deepened and took on a psychotherapeutic dimension. A previously unnoticed fact is highlighted: the existence of a very first Kleinian system, later abandoned, but which preceded the discovery of the technique of playing and which made it possible: it essentially consists of a theory of sublimations and inhibitions. The clinical experiences through which the game technique was discovered are then analyzed. The psychoanalyses of very young children, whose games and fantasies brought Melanie Klein, for the first time, into the presence of the archaic Oedipus complex, the initial stages of the superego and the existence of an early transference, are described and commented on. Finally, the clinical and theoretical evolution that led, in 1932, to the concepts exposed in child psychoanalysis is analyzed: discovery of the psychotic core of personality, description of the original aspects of childhood psychosis, and the first form of theories of projection, introjection, cleavage and of repair.