The Work of Melanie Klein

All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Course material will be sent 1 day before the event. The course will start at 13:30pm and end at 17:00pm on both days and includes a tea break. All attendees will also receive access to the recording, available to watch back for 3 months.

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In the 1920’s. Melanie Klein was a pioneer of child psychoanalysis whose radically new way of working with children brought her into sharp conflict with Freud’s daughter Anna – also a pioneer in the field. But by the mid 1930’s, the understanding of infancy and childhood she had arrived at through her work with her young patients (as well as with adults), had enabled her to create a powerful new version of psychoanalytic theory that would take psychoanalysis completely beyond Freud, marking the beginning of the Object Relations school.

We will study Klein’s revolutionary contribution to the psychoanalysis of children, namely her ‘psychoanalytic play technique’ which sees children’s play as equivalent to the free associations of the adult patient. The child’s play, in the consulting room, was seen by her as representing its emotional conflicts and anxieties in symbolic form, and her observations of children’s play enabled her to formulate her understanding of ‘unconscious phantasy’ and ‘internal objects’.

By the mid 1930’s she had arrived at the central concept in the new ‘Kleinian’ understanding of emotional development, namely that of the ‘Depressive Position’, and we will study in detail her writings on this crucial, but not always well-understood notion, bringing into focus her understanding of mourning, guilt, reparation and the manic defences.

In Klein’s view, the foundations of the development of the personality are laid down during the first year of life, and the earliest form of psychological organisation (preceding the achievement of the ‘Depressive Position’) is the ‘Paranoid Schizoid position’, which she first described during the 1940’s. We will examine her formulations on this mode of psychic functioning, and bring into clear focus her crucial contribution in understanding the role of ‘envy’ and ‘gratitude’ in the process of development.

The course will conclude by exploring the use of Klein’s insights to provide a deep understanding of the human condition, evaluating her contribution to the understanding of society, art and human sexuality.

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Speaker:

Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and the overlap of philosophy and psychoanalysis.

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Tickets: £ 45

Freud Museum Members and Patrons receive 20% off the standard ticket price on all events, courses, conferences and On Demand programming.

A limited number of £20 bursary tickets will be available for those unable to pay the full amount. Please email perry@freud.org.uk to apply for a bursary.