Julia Segal

The Kleinian approach to psychodynamic psychotherapy depends on the capacity of therapists to make contact with their clients' inner world, including the hidden anxieties which disrupt their clients' lives.  Therapists' sympathetic but realistic understanding of frightening and frightened elements of clients' minds and personalities can enable clients to reassess, reclaim and modify previously rejected aspects of themselves.  At the same time clients are able to reassess memories and experiences of other people in their lives, both past and present.  With the help of the therapist, the client's inner world is rebuilt on firmer foundations.  This has lasting and significant consequences for future relationships, both with the self and with others.

Some of these concepts may seem strange: Kleinians are sometimes noted for their difficult and odd ideas.  However, many people find that once they get used to them, the ideas are both comprehensible and useful.  Children seem to have less difficulty understanding them than some adults.

Many forms of counselling and psychotherapy have developed in opposition to the ideas of Freud.  Kleinian therapists of all kinds, however, are more likely to emphasize the debt owed to the psychoanalytical inheritance.  Melanie Klein herself was a psychoanalyst: although she disagreed with Freud over some important issues, fundamentally she saw his method and understanding as the foundation on which she based all her work.  Similarly, Kleinian counsellors and psychotherapists see Klein's method and understanding as providing the foundation on which they base their work.  Their emphasis on the value of carrying over into the counselling relationship much which has been learnt in the more intensive setting of psychoanalysis gives their work a distinctive aspect.

Kleinian therapists, for example, are very strict about their own time-keeping: they are unlikely to discuss any aspect of their own lives with clients; they are likely to keep their rooms, setting and own appearance as unchanging as possible.  All of these things, they believe, have significance to clients which clients may not immediately recognize, but which affect the work which can be done.  They also pay attention to the unspoken anxieties of the client and do not rely simply on what the client says directly.

Further information about this therapeutic approach written by the authors, can be found in "Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy: The Essential Guide", edited by Professor Stephen Palmer and published by Sage, London.  Price £18.99.

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