Background
Melanie Klein was born in Vienna on March 30, 1882.
Melanie Klein was born in Vienna on March 30, 1882.
At age fourteen, she decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and study medicine, but with her engagement, at seventeen, her plans changed, and she studied art and history at the University of Vienna though she never completed her degree.
After moving to Budapest, she chanced upon the works of Sigmund Freud, and was immediately drawn to psychoanalysis. After being analyzed by Sandor Ferenczi, she relocated to Berlin (with her three children but without her husband; they later divorced), and finally, in 1926, she accepted the invitation of Ernest Jones and settled in London, where her technical and theoretical creativity flourished.
Klein was keenly aware of the obstacles, theoretical, technical, and methodological, in attempting to penetrate the psyche of infants. To meet the challenge, she brought to bear an acute intuitive sense in extrapolating from adult and child psychoanalysis. Her language in describing the primitive inner life of infants is accordingly quite fantastic. A Kleinian baby lives in a world populated by good and bad breasts, imagines numerous penises to be incorporated in the mother’s vagina, and desires to scoop out the mother’s breast and to destroy its contents. These unusual and striking images can daunt the uninitiated and have even deterred many psychoanalysts from accepting her ideas. Nevertheless, her work altered the theory of psychoanalysis.
Klein’s focus was not only upon innate drives and inner conflicts, which from the outset had marked psychoanalytic thinking. She also stressed the emotional ties with the outside world, consisting at first primarily of the mother. She w'as a founder of the object relations school of psychoanalysis.
In the politicized atmosphere of British psychoanalysis, Klein came into occasionally acrimonious conflict with Anna Freud over issues of technique and theory. In some of these conflicts, Klein’s daughter, Mclitta Schmideberg, also an analyst, took sides against her mother.
Klein posited a paranoid-schizoid position, according to which, in the course of the normal development of a baby in the first half year of life, images of mother as good (helping, satisfying) and bad (frustrating, threatening) are kept separate. This is followed by the depressive position, the second half of the first year, during which the baby gradually discovers that mother is one. Having achieved integration of mother, loss becomes a possibility; for the first time, the infant may experience anxiety, guilt, and sadness.