science · 30 March 1882 · 142 years ago
birth
Born 30 Mar 1882; died 22 Sep 1960 at age 78.
(née Reizes) Austrian-born British psychoanalyst known for her work with young children, in which observations of free play provided insights into the child's unconscious fantasy life, enabling her to psychoanalyze children as young as two or three years of age. After WW I, Klein 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.
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