Background
Melanie Klein was born in Vienna on March 30, 1882. She was raised in a Jewish middle-class family.
( Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative ventur...)
Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1957 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.
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(This book shows the growth of Melanie Klein's work and id...)
This book shows the growth of Melanie Klein's work and ideas between 1921 and 1945, and traces her theories on childhood development, criminality and childhood pyschosis, symbol formation, and the early development of conscience.
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Melanie Klein was born in Vienna on March 30, 1882. She was raised in a Jewish middle-class family.
She lacked both the academic background and the medical training usually found in those who choose psychoanalysis for a profession.
She was a married woman with children when she began undergoing analysis about 1912. During her analysis she began to observe the behavior of a disturbed child relative and to interpret this behavior in the light of her own psychoanalytic experience. Her analyst, recognizing his patient's aptitude, encouraged her in her efforts at child therapy, a hitherto neglected area.
Originally trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst, Klein made observations and conclusions regarding child behavior that led her to views differing from those held by orthodox Freudian psychoanalysts. She was one of the first to engage in child analysis, beginning in 1920. She evolved a system of play therapy to supplement the usual psychoanalytic procedure, perhaps because the age of her clients indicated more appropriate methods than the exclusively verbal free-association technique then used with adult patients. Gradually she evolved a technique more suitable for probing the deep-layered recesses of the child's mind. By providing the child with small toys representing father, mother, or siblings, she was able to elicit the child's subconscious feelings. Her technique also used the child's free play and his spontaneous communications.
Applying her intuitive perception to the behaviors elicited by these new techniques, Klein made discoveries, especially about what goes on in the subconscious of the 2-year-old and of even an earlier age, called by psychoanalysts the preoedipal phases. Freudian theory had left somewhat of a gap regarding these first 2 years. She found that aggression and sadism play an even greater part in the child's mind than had been assumed by Freud. Her first paper, "The Development of a Child, " was presented to the Budapest Congress of Psychoanalysis in 1919. In 1921 she went to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute as the first child therapist.
In what has been called her second period, beginning in 1934, Klein theorized her previous observations on child behavior, arriving at conceptual conclusions based on them. She wrote now of her earlier findings, on the "depressive position" and the "schizoid-paranoid position, " indicating possible ways in which these infancy states relate to psychotic processes in adults. In the 1930s she began to analyze adults as well as children. Her last child analysis terminated at the close of the 1940s. From then until her death on September 22, 1960, she treated adults, analyzed students of psychoanalysis, taught, and wrote.
(This book shows the growth of Melanie Klein's work and id...)
( Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative ventur...)
Quotations:
"One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults. "
"God has put something noble and good into every heart his hand has created. So while living on earth we must always remember to learn from yesterday, live for today, and hope for tomorrow because time will only show what has mattered throughout our journey. "
"The highly ambitious person, in spite of all his successes, always remains dissatisfied, in the same way as a greedy baby is never satisfied. "
"Feminism freed my mind. Yoga freed my body. It's one thing to intellectualize self-love and another to embody it. "
"My psycho-analytic work has convinced me that when in the baby's mind the conflicts between love and hate arise, and the fears of losing the loved one become active, a very important step is made in development. "
In 1919 she became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society.
Her marriage failed and her son died in a climbing accident, that may have been a suicide, while her daughter, whom Klein had analysed as a child, the well-known psychoanalyst Melitta Schmideberg, fought her openly in the British Psychoanalytical Society.