Play, Fantasy, and the Object-Relations: Melanie Klein’s Route to Understand Children’s Inner World

The paper summarizes key contributions, new insights, and legacies of Melanie Klein to the field of education, including the play technique to understand the children’s psychological world. She believed the inhibition of children’s play marks the emergence of intolerable thoughts to the surface of the mind. By observing the block of children’s play and interpreting that block, the psychoanalyst can find out intolerable thoughts or anxieties of the child’s inner world as well as is able to make their play become freer as the child feels their thoughts are understood. In addition, her contribution also lies in the work that she developed from Freud’s theory of the ego to analyze the primary object-relation that each child experiences right after their birth: the relation with the mother that can create both satisfaction and conversely disappointment, leading to the anxiety inside the child. Moreover, the bad internalized mother can have further impact on the child’s life with the feeling of a victim, guilt, and the pain of holding aggression toward the ones loved and needed. Klein also brought a new insight to the understanding of the unconscious zone, which is not only forced by sexual impulses, but also the internalized objects in the relation with the self. Her ideas of the play technique and object-relations have been developed by other scholars, which continue shedding the light for applying play as a therapy for children’s mental health as well as how to set up secure attachment for the child from the primary caregivers.