Melanie Klein

 1) Her Biography 

Melanie Klein was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna in 1882. Despite her education at the gymnasium, she was unable to pursue her intellectual dreams of attending medical school due to a family financial downturn, and at the age of twenty-one, she married Arthur Klein, an industrial chemist, and started raising a family. She had three children in the end. Klein struggled from melancholy and “nerves” during her early married life, owing in part to a tumultuous connection with her mother, and after relocating with her family to Budapest in 1910, she sought psychotherapy with Sandor Ferenczi. Ferenczi pushed Klein to psychoanalyze her own children, based on her academic interest in psychoanalysis. No one had attempted analyzing children before, therefore Klein went about establishing a kid analysis approach that is being used today without any direction. In her “play technique,” a child’s play activity is understood as a symbol of unconscious information, similar to how dreams and spontaneous associations are analyzed in adult analysis. Klein was the first psychologist to see play as a significant activity for children, and her “play technique” eventually influenced the creation of play therapy. 

Klein met Freud for the first time at the International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Budapest in 1918, and later remarked, “I recall precisely how impressed I was, and how the desire to commit myself to psychoanalysis was increased by this impression” (quoted in Grosskurth, 1986, p.71). Klein’s marriage was failing by the time she became a full member of the Hungarian Psycho-Analytic Society, so she left Arthur and moved to Berlin with her children, where she joined the Berlin Psycho-Analytic Society and began analysis with the prominent Karl Abraham. In his own theories on oral and anal sadistic impulses in infancy, Abraham was building Freud’s concept of the death instinct, which Klein quickly included into her analyses of children’s play. Other Berlin analysts were less supportive of her work, despite Abraham’s encouragement. Klein came to London to join the British Psycho-Analytical Society when Abraham died in 1926. 

Melanie Klein found intellectual sanctuary among British psychoanalysts in London, who were enthusiastic about her new ideas and eager to master her play approach. She spent the remainder of her life there, turning her child development theory into a new school of psychoanalysis and educating future analysts in her methods. Klein’s first theoretical breakthrough was to include the death instinct in her description of the early emergence of a superego prior to the resolution of the Oedipus Complex. The British analysts and the Viennese Society, where Anna Freud was putting out her own ideas on child analysis, clashed over this challenge to Freud’s theory of development and her novel play approach. The outcome was the 1927 Symposium on Child Analysis, which was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Klein would go on to produce some of her most significant work over the following decade as a result of this argument. 

Klein was a major figure in the British Society, serving on the Training Committee, as a training analyst, and as the head of the Kleinian group, which included John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott for a while. Her success, however, came at a cost: throughout the Controversial Discussions, her daughter Melitta had opposed her, and the two remained separated until Klein’s death. Klein found peace in her art after the deaths of two of her children. She proceeded to expand on her views regarding schizoid defensive mechanisms, such as splitting, and their significance in borderline states. Her last project looked at the issues of jealousy, appreciation, and restitution in the mother-infant bond, which were all too familiar to her as a daughter and a mother. After her death from cancer in 1960, she released Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961/1984), a thorough case narrative of the analysis of a little child during the war. 

2) Main Works: 

The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932), Contributions to Psychoanalysis, 1921-1945, Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961) and Our Adult World and Other Essays (1963). 

3) Her Contributions to Psychoanalysis: 

Melanie Klein is one of the most influential female psychoanalysts of all time, yet she is also one of the least well-known among American psychologists. Despite the fact that Melanie Klein’s contribution to psychology is significantly larger than that of other female analysts such as Anna Freud, Karen Horney, and Helene Deutsch, you are undoubtedly more acquainted with their names. Klein founded the school of psychoanalysis known as object relations theory, which puts the mother-infant interaction at the core of personality formation, and inspired famous psychologists like John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott’s work. As a result, her influence on developmental psychology has been indirect but significant. 

Klein’s book The Psychoanalysis of Children, published in 1932, stated that the child has a main object relationship with the mother and has a psychological existence characterized by sadistic phantasies stemming from an intrinsic aggressive urge. Klein then explored the relationship between mourning and primitive defense mechanisms in a seminal paper titled “A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states” (1935/1984), written shortly after the death of her son Hans, and introduced her concept of two fundamental phases of development: the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. Klein’s views regarding schizoid defensive mechanisms sparked a heated dispute within the British Society, which held a series of contentious Discussions throughout the war years to determine if “Kleinianism,” as it was now called, was really psychoanalysis or strayed too far from Freud’s original theory. Following the discussion, it was decided to present two schools of thought: Kleinianism and Freudianism. Klein was therefore the first psychoanalyst to criticize Freud’s explanation of psychic development while being a member of the psychoanalytic movement. 

4) Psychoanalysis of Children: 

Klien published her findings and theories of child analysis in The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932). She watched free play with toys as a technique of identifying the psychological impulses and concepts linked with the early years of life, believing that children’s play is a symbolic way of regulating anxiety. Her object-relations hypothesis linked ego formation to the encounters with diverse drive objects, physical items connected with mental drives, throughout this time period. She discovered that a child’s early development involves relating to portions rather than whole objects—for example, the breast rather than the mother. Klein used the phrase “paranoid-schizoid posture” to describe this unstable and rudimentary manner of identification. The depressed posture is the next stage of development, in which the newborn develops a relationship with entire things, such as his or her mother or father. The infant’s realization of the ambivalence of his sentiments toward things, and hence the moderation of his internal conflicts regarding them, characterizes this period. 

Klein argued that anxiety in the paranoid-schizoid posture was persecutory, threatening self-annihilation, whereas anxiety in the second, later position was depressive, relating to dread of the infant’s destructive tendencies causing damage to valued things. Klein began working with adult patients in 1934 to explain and expand her thoughts on newborn and childhood anxiety, publishing a series of articles and a book called Envy and Gratitude (1957). Narrative of a Child Analysis, her last work, was based on meticulous notes gathered during 1941 and was released posthumously in 1961. 

5) Application of her Teachings for a Mother: 

The child has a lot of physiological requirements, including food and warmth, but no social need. When a newborn gets interested in and attracted to a human figure, particularly a mother, it occurs as a consequence of the mother satisfying the baby’s physiological demands and the infant learning that she is the source of fulfilment through time. Infants have an innate need to connect with a human breast, to suck it and to own it orally. The newborn eventually learns that there is a mother tied to the breast and returns to her. Infants have an innate need to be in contact with and adhere to a human person. In this view, there is a main need for an object apart from food, just as there is a primary need for food and warmth. Infants dislike being pushed out of the womb and want to return. 

All of Klein’s theories highlight the importance of human connection and the feeling of relating to being human that a child forms via the integral connection with his mother through the ways described above. For mothers, the key take away from Klien’s theory is that they form that human connection with their child, so they are brought up without feelings of separation anxiety, melancholy jealousy and rage.