orig. Melanie Reizes
born March 30, 1882, Vienna, Austria
died Sept. 22, 1960, London, Eng.
Austrian-British psychoanalyst.
She married at age 21 and had three children before undergoing psychoanalysis with Ferenczi Sándor in Budapest, Hung. She studied the psychoanalysis of young children, joining the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (1921–26) and later moving to London. In works such as The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932) and Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961), she asserted that children's play was a symbolic way of controlling anxiety and that observation of free play with toys could serve as a means of determining early psychological impulses.