Back to Table of Contents
The objects of the external world, and above all the mother’s body, thus acquire their irreplaceable symbolic value. They provide the child with the only medium by which he can represent his body to himself (Petot 1982. , p. 83). Petot furthermore theorizes that the idea of ‘geography of the maternal body’, although not explicit in Klein’s writings of this period (1923), is necessarily implicit in the material of Klein’s child patient Erich's analysis. Describing her analysis of a child Trude, in “The Psychological Principles of Infant Analysis”. Klein (1927a) states: "She tied my hands and feet, she lifted the sofa-cover and said she was making 'po-kacki-kucki'. It turned out that she was looking into the mother's 'popo' for the kackis, which to her represented children" (p.28). A few lines later she writes: "I found that the objects against which she hurt herself (...) signified to her (in accordance with the primitive childish identification) her mother, or at times her father who was punishing her."(p. 29). Klein’s interpretation was: "...the baby doll stood to her amongst other things for the little brother whom she had wanted to take, away from her mother". For Klein, apparently, children's game is representation . "In their play children represent symbolically phantasies, wishes and experiences. Here they are employing the same language, the same archaic, phylogenetically acquired mode of expression, as we are familiar from dreams. We can only fully understand it if we approach it by the method Freud has evolved for unravelling dreams. Symbolism is only one aspect. To understand children’s play in relation to their behavior during the analytic hour, we must consider more than the symbols that often appear in their games. We must also take into account the means of representation, the mechanisms of dream work, and the necessity of examining the entire nexus of phenomena ( Ibid. , p. 32). In a note on the same page, Klein adds that dolls can have different meanings in play, sometimes they stand for the penis, sometimes for the child stolen from the mother, sometimes for the little patient itself, etc. Relevant to representation, Klein concludes: “Sexual experiences are associated with the masturbation-phantasies and, with these, find a representation and abreaction play. Among the experiences dramatized, representations of the primal scene play a prominent part, and they regularly appear in the foreground of the analyses of young children.” (Klein, 1927a, p. 33, n. 5) In the “ Symposium on Child-Analysis” (1927b, p. 349), Klein discusses the most effective way of establishing contact with the child’s unconscious. She states that representation through toys—indeed, symbolic representation in general, insofar as it is to some extent removed from the child’s own person—is invested with less anxiety than confession in words. That is why playing and representing with children is the easiest way to get to phantasy. Children do the same as adults, conforming to the modes of representation peculiars to them. In the following “Personification in the Play of Children”, describing the treatment of another child Emma, Klein (1929a) explains in detail how her child patient Emma plays roles with her. Although she barely uses the word representation it is clear that this role playing is a sort of representational game where the child uses herself and the analyst instead of toys or puppets to express her internal conflicts. At the end of this paper, the author discusses character
769
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online