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