"In lucid, uncluttered prose, Janet Sayers presents the reader with a fresh viewing of the lives and times of four extraordinary women pioneer analysts. Sayers recounts how they were able to shift the theoretic balance of the day to include the creative evolution of their thinking. This book is of value not only for the novice, but certainly for many others who can learn from these excellent, abridged biographies." --Dr. Helene DeRosis

"In lucid, uncluttered prose, Janet Sayers presents the reader with a fresh viewing of the lives and times of four extraordinary women pioneer analysts. Sayers recounts how they were able to shift the theoretic balance of the day to include the creative evolution of their thinking. This book is of value not only for the novice, but certainly for many others who can learn from these excellent, abridged biographies." --Dr. Helene DeRosis

The central theme of this book is concerned with the controversies on technique between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein in the 1920s and 1930s, and with a clear differentiation between child analysis proper and analytical child psychotherapy. Alex Holder takes into account the historic background in which child psychoanalysis developed, especially World War II and the Nazi regime in Germany. The author also looks at the way child psychoanalysis developed in specific institutions, such as the Hampstead Child Therapy Course in London, and in specific areas, such as the spread of child analysis in the US. The concluding chapter is on the importance of knowledge of child analysis among psychoanalysts working with adults. The differences in the theories of the two "greats" in child analysis, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, are examined one by one, including such concepts as the role of transference, the Oedipus complex and the superego.

Electra vs Oedipus explores the deeply complex and often turbulent relationship between mothers and daughters. In contrast to Sigmund Freud’s conviction that the father is the central figure, the book puts forward the notion that women are in fact far more (pre)occupied with their mother. Drawing on the author’s extensive clinical experience, the book provides numerous case studies which shed light on women’s emotional development. Topics include: love and hate between mothers and daughters the history of maternal love childbirth and depression rejected mothers. Electra vs Oedipus will be a valuable resource for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and all those with an interest in the dynamics of the mother–daughter relationship.

Melanie Klein remains one of the most important and influential figures in psychoanalysis. Klein pioneered the analysis of children and applied her insights on the infantile origins of unconscious drives to adult analysis.Meira Likierman's study is the best available introduction to Melanie Klein's thought and work.

Child analysis has occupied a special place in the history of psychoanalysis because of the challenges it poses to practitioners and the clashes it has provoked among its advocates. Since the early days in Vienna under Sigmund Freud child psychoanalysts have tried to comprehend and make comprehensible to others the psychosomatic troubles of childhood and to adapt clinical and therapeutic approaches to all the stages of development of the baby, the child, the adolescent and the young adult. Claudine and Pierre Geissmann trace the history and development of child analysis over the last century and assess the contributions made by pioneers of the discipline, whose efforts to expand its theoretical foundations led to conflict between schools of thought, most notably to the rift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Now taught and practised widely in Europe, the USA and South America, child and adolescent psychoanalysis is unique in the insight it gives into the psychological aspects of child development, and in the therapeutic benefits it can bring both to the child and its family.

While much writing has been devoted, predominantly by contemporary Kleinian adult psychoanalysts, to the Kleinian and post Kleinian development of Klein's work, comparatively little has recently been written about the ongoing importance and character of Klein's clinical work for contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy or analysis with very small children (2 - 6 year olds). Little attention now seems to be paid to the revolutionary character of her work from the start (in the early 1920s) with this age group and its challenges, still relevant today, or to her recognition of the importance of mother-infant relations in the period long before World War II brought investigation into and understanding of problems of attachment, separation and loss. This book addresses these issues and re-explores Klein's work in these (and other) areas. This book is concerned primarily with Klein's work with pre-latency children and aims to give these small children more of the voice today that Melanie Klein herself discovered.

INTRODUCING guide to the pioneering child psychoanalyst. Born in Vienna in 1882, Melanie Klein became a pioneer in child psychoanalysis and developed several ground-breaking concepts about the nature and crucial importance of the early stages of infantile development. Although she was a devoted Freudian, many of her ideas were seen within the psychoanalytic movement as highly controversial, and this led to heated conflicts, particularly with Freud's daughter, Anna. Introducing Melanie Klein brilliantly explains Klein's ideas, and shows the importance of her startling discoveries which raised such opposition at the time and are only now being recognized for their explanatory power. Her concepts of the depressive position and the paranoid-schizoid position are now in common usage and her work has to be taken seriously by psychoanalysts the world over. She is also now important in many academic fields within the human sciences.