In April 1941, while the Luftwaffe was still bombing London nightly, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein began the treatment of a ten-year-old boy in the Scottish highland town of Pitlochry. Like the Pevensie children in The Chronicles of Narnia , ‘Richard’, as Klein referred to her little patient, had been evacuated during the Blitz and sent to the countryside. He saw her six times a week in a hall used at other times by girl scouts. Even in this safe haven, Richard was completely saturated with the war. In their sessions, he talked constantly about Hitler, swastikas, air-raids, panzer divisions and U-boats, and the perfidy of Goebbels and Göring and Ribbentrop. In one session, he gathered all the available pencils, sharpened them to a good point, and brandished them wildly in the air. ‘With these I could kill Hitler,’ he said. Klein recorded her sessions with Richard in a full-length case history, Narrative of a Child Analysis , first published in 1961.…