A historical survey of the development, and contestation, of the key person approach
This is an extract from a piece of research which I undertook a couple of years back. It is an attempt to describe how the key person approach developed through the ideas of Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, and the significant contribution made by later practitioners and writers.
From the 1920s onwards, psychoanalytic thinking began to influence theory and practice in English nursery childcare, an attention to children’s emotional development which would eventually inform the development of the key person system. Susan Isaacs’s Malting House School (open from 1924-1929) for children aged from 2 upwards provided the context for the development of some of the key ideas in the Kleinian school of psychoanalysis (Mitchell, 1986). Isaacs provided the children with an environment in which there were more opportunities for free play and fewer prohibitions, to enable “an all-round lessening of the degree of inhibition of children’s impulses" (Isaacs, quoted in Drummond: 2000). In this context, aspects of the child’s anxiety could be expressed symbolically, and this symbolisation was seen to support the child’s ego-development and the "greater dramatic vividness of … social and imaginative and intellectual life as a whole" (Isaacs, quoted in Drummond: 2000).
