0.4 Neo-freudian perspectives on personality  (Page 9/28)

Discussion Question: Is a child at play engaging in the same mental activity as an adult engaged in free association? Melanie Klein believed yes, but Anna Freud disagreed. Do you think that children are capable of the same participatory role in psychoanalysis as adults, and is play the best way to observe children?

Late in her life and career, Anna Freud extended her work beyond the psychoanalytic treatment of children to larger issues of child advocacy. In collaboration with Joseph Goldstein, a professor of law at Yale University, and Albert Solnit, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Yale’s medical school and Director of the Child Study Center at Yale, she co-authored two books: Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (Goldstein, A. Freud,&Solnit, 1973) and Before the Best Interests of the Child (Goldstein, A. Freud,&Solnit, 1979). These books focus on the importance of placing the interests of children first when the government intervenes in cases involving the custody and placement of children. These situations arise is many circumstances, such as in the case of orphans or following a difficult divorce, but also in more extreme cases of abuse or when certain parents do not believe in allowing medical care for very sick children. Since these situations can pit one parent against another, or the parents against the interests of society, the authors addressed very clearly reasons why the interests of the child should be placed first:

Some will assert that the views presented in this volume are so child-oriented as to neglect the needs and rights of the adults. In fact, this is not the case. There is nothing one-sided about our position, that the child’s interests should be the paramount consideration once, but not before, a child’s placement becomes the subject of official controversy. Its other side is that the law, to accord with the continuity guideline, must safeguard the rights of any adults, serving as parents, to raise their children as they see fit, free of intervention by the state, and free of law-aided and law-abetted harassment by disappointed adult claimants. To say that a child’s ongoing relationship with a specific adult, the psychological parent, must not be interrupted, is also to say that this adult’s rights are protected against intrusion by the state on behalf of other adults.

As set out in this volume, then, a child’s placement should rest entirely on consideration for the child’s own inner situation and developmental needs… (Goldstein, A. Freud,&Solnit, 1973)

So long as the child is part of a viable family, his own interests are merged with those of the other members. Only after the family fails in its function should the child’s interests become a matter for state intrusion. (Goldstein, A. Freud,&Solnit, 1979)

Object relations theory

There are those who say that it is inappropriate to refer to object relations theory as if it were a single theory. It is more appropriate to refer to object relations theorists, a group of psychoanalysts who share a common interest in object relations, but whose theories tend to vary with each individual theorist. Sigmund Freud used the term object to refer to any target of instinctual impulses. In the current context, an object is a person, or some substitute for a person such as a blanket or a teddy bear, which is the aim of the relational needs of a developing child. Melanie Klein is generally recognized as the first object relations theorist, and her change in emphasis from Sigmund Freud’s view was rather profound. Freud believed that a child is born more like an animal than a human, driven entirely by instinctual impulses. Only after the ego and the superego begin to develop is the child psychologically human. Klein, however, felt that a baby is born with drives that include human objects, and the corresponding need for relationships. In other words, the infant’s instinctual impulses are designed to help the child adapt to the distinctly human world into which the child is born (Mitchell&Black, 1995).