Play technique See Child analysis; Technique

One of the innate unconscious phantasies at the oral level is of poisoning
mother’s milk (or creativity) by attacking and invading her . It is also then
feared that the object will put poison into the subject in retaliation. In her
early (1921) paper `The development of a child’ Klein describes Fritz’s fears
of being poisoned by witches and by a soldier and she connects these
anxieties to his curiosity and confusion about feeding, urination, defaecation
and sex. Fritz equates urine with milk, takes great interest in what his
father puts into his mother, is disgusted at what his parents get up to, at
times wishes them dead and fears their retaliation. In later papers, Klein
outlines the phantasies that she believes exist in the mind of the infant
during the late stage of oral-sadism and writes `these violent modes of
attack give place to hidden assaults by the most re®ned methods which
sadism can devise, and the excreta are equated with poisonous substances’
(Klein, 1930, p. 220). Later Klein links these attacks to envy and describes
the aim of envy as being `to put badness, primarily bad excrements and bad
parts of the self into the mother, and ®rst of all into the breast, to spoil and
destroy her’ (Klein, 1957, p. 181).