KLEIN, Melanie (1882-1960), Austrian psychoanalyst, who devised
therapeutic techniques for children that had great impact on present methods of child care
and rearing. Born in Vienna and strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud's close associates
Sándor Ferenczi (1873-1933) and Karl Abraham (1877-1925), Klein after World War I began
to develop methods of play therapy, showing that how children play with toys reveals
earlier infantile fantasies and anxieties. In The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932), she
showed how these anxieties affected a child's developing ego, superego, and sexuality to
bring about emotional disorders. Through her methods she attempted to relieve children of
disabling guilt by having them direct toward the therapist the aggressive and Oedipal
feelings they could not express to their parents.
Analysts and therapists