Getting to grips with Kleinian concepts: December Event

100 years of Klein and post-Kleinian developments

We are pleased to launch a major new series of online events of various types exploring key Kleinian and post-Kleinian concepts (1925-2025).

As part of our ongoing series on Kleinian concepts, Kate Pugh will explore Klein’s pioneering early work with child patients using play, how it shaped her theories of emotional development in early infancy - radical and controversial at the time - and how these theories continue to illuminate our understanding of, and work with, adults today.

This event is suitable for anyone who wants to learn more about Klein’s groundbreaking child analysis techniques and the theories that emerged from it, including qualified practitioners/clinicians and those with a more general interest.

The event will be chaired by Francesca Hume.

More about this event

Klein’s ideas were rooted in the work of Freud and Abraham but took her in new directions of understanding the very early processes that shape a child’s inner world. She came to understand early splitting and projection and introjection in relation to the object and vividly caught the origin of phantasy emanating from the body. This proved a turning point in the history of psychoanalysis and our understanding of emotional development.

These embodied phantasies were displayed to Klein by her child patients in their play. She showed how articulating her understanding of their communications led to further opening up of their underlying fears and a lessening of their anxiety. In particular it relived the persecutory guilt of damage done to the maternal body which accompanied children's early oral and anal sadistic phantasies and which were played out in the transference.

This understanding could not have contrasted more with the ideas of Anna Freud, who considered that the transference should not be the focus of work with children and that instead the analyst would be presenting themselves as a new developmental object to the child. This inevitably led to open disagreement and eventually the Controversial Discussions which helped to further clarify Kleinian theory.

Klein showed how it was only in understanding the importance of the more destructive aspects of the object relationship that the loving feelings could fully emerge with the recovery of the good object. As well as her influence on adult analytic technique, Klein’s groundbreaking work with children gave us a whole new theory of infantile emotional development and, crucially, an understanding of severe mental illness in adulthood – in particular manic-depressive illness, psychosis and depression.

Kathryn Pugh is a child and adolescent and adult analyst, and a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She worked as a consultant psychiatrist in medical psychotherapy in the NHS for over 20 years in a central London clinic that provides psychotherapy to the community for families, seeing children, adolescents and adults. She now works in a psychoanalytic clinic attached to Kings and Maudsley hospitals running a seminar on psychoanalytic thinking in work with children and adolescents and also on patients presenting with psychosomatic states. She also has a private practice in South London. Kathryn teaches in the UK and abroad and has presented papers at conferences, including most recently a paper on child analysis at the Melanie Klein Trust conference.

Francesca Hume is a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society. She worked for more than 25 years at the Tavistock Clinic where she ran the Adult Psychoanalytic Training for 14 years. She now works in private practice and teaches and lectures extensively on Kleinian themes in the UK and abroad. She recently co-edited the book On Learning and Unlearning through the Clinical Encounter which examines the learning process involved in becoming a psychoanalytic practitioner.

The following dates and speakers can be found below, with more details to come shortly:

• 24th of January - Maria Rhode
• 7th of February - Judith Jackson
• 14th of March - Catalina Bronstein

All registered attendees will receive a link to the recording following the live event once it has been edited which will be valid for two weeks following the event. These events will be in English

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

We are a charity, and we rely upon income from events like these to continue our work. However, we do not want the price of entry to be a barrier to anyone keen to attend our online events. If the ticket price is prohibitively high for you at the current time, please email the MKT Administrator at contact@melaniekleintrust.org.uk, who has a number of free places available for each event.

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

How we use your data: please note that by registering for this event you are giving consent for us to add your details to the Melanie Klein Trust mailing list. We use Mailchimp to store subscribers' details, which we use to send occasional emails about news and events that may be of interest. We don't pass on subscribers' details to anyone else and you can unsubscribe at any time. For more details see our privacy policy