Melanie Klein's Contribution To Play Therapy

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Melanie Klein was born on March 30th 1882, born in Vienna, Austria. Melanie was going to go to attend medical school but family fortunes disabled that process. Melanie was the last of four siblings. Growing up, Melanie’s relationship with her mother, Libussa Reize, was always difficult causing depression later on in her life. Having her sights set on studying at the gymnasium, in 1898 she passed her entrance exams for psychiatric medicine. At age twenty-one she got married to Arthur Klein, who was an industrial chemist and they had three children. Melanie first experienced psychoanalysis when she began taking treatment after her mother’s death. BIOGRAPHY In 1910, they moved to Budapest where she began to take a Psychoanalysis course with Sandor Ferenczi. Where he came up with an idea that she should perform psychoanalysis to her own children. Doing so, she came up with a technique called “play techniques”. This is where the child play activity was taking as a symbolic unconsciousness material and interpreted into the same way dreams and free association are in adult analysis. Melanie was the first to view children’s play as meaningful, and later on this technique became a contribution to play therapy (Donaldson,G. n.d). In 1918, her marriage was failing so she took her and her …show more content…

Melanie worked hand and hand with these children and toddlers giving her full insight on the process of child development, she argued against Freud saying the supergo is actually present in the moment he child is born. She also argued against Freud that the Oedipal complex was develop much earlier. Melanie was also one of the creators of object relation theory emphasizes the interactions between individuals indicated that the people are the

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