Klein, Melanie (1882–1960)

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Klein, Melanie (1882–1960)

Controversial psychoanalyst whose revolutionary technique of "play analysis" and insights into early childhood development made an important and lasting contribution to the practice of psychoanalysis. Born Melanie Reizes in Vienna, Austria, on March 30, 1882; died in London, England, on September 22, 1960; daughter of Moriz Reizes (a medical doctor) and Libussa (Deutsch) Reizes (a shopkeeper); married Arthur Klein, in 1903 (divorced 1923); children: Melitta Klein ; Hans Klein; Eric Klein.

Began analyzing children in Budapest (1919); moved to Berlin (1921); elected a full member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society (1923); developed the technique of "play analysis" (1921–23); moved to London (1926); became first European analyst elected to the British Psycho-Analytical Society (1927); analyzed last child patient (late 1940s).

Publications:

The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932); Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1921–1945 (1948); Envy and Gratitude (1957); (published posthumously) Narrative of a Child Psycho-Analysis (1961).

If the first page in the history of the psychoanalysis of children belongs to Sigmund Freud, whose 1909 "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" is the earliest published case of a child analysis, much of the rest of the story belongs to Melanie Klein. For more than 40 years, she was a highly original and controversial figure in the psychoanalytic community, who wrote, taught and conducted research in the field of child psychology. Her revolutionary techniques and theories about infantile sexuality and child development, outlined in four books and numerous published papers, evoked widespread admiration and respect, as well as shock and controversy. The fact that her theories continue to arouse strong reactions, debate and discussion is a testament to the lasting mark she has left on the practice of psychoanalysis.

There is little doubt that her work not only had a profound influence in technique but that it contributed to a change in the psychoanalytical approach to the understanding of the mind.
—Hanna Segal

Melanie Klein's lifelong passion for learning was formed early by the intellectually charged household in which she was raised. Born in Vienna on March 30, 1882, she was the youngest of four children of Dr. Moriz Reizes and Libussa Deutsch Reizes . Her father, though unsuccessful in his medical practice, was a brilliant, intellectually formidable man who read widely and taught himself ten European languages. His wife, 15 years his junior, was a beautiful woman who shared and supported his devotion to learning. Due to financial pressures early in the marriage, she operated a successful shop that sold exotic plants and animals. Though Klein preferred her loving mother to her remote father, there is little doubt that she was deeply influenced by him. His burning commitment to education and knowledge stoked the fires of her own intellectual ambitions.

Klein's early life was also tragically marked by the illnesses and deaths of two of her siblings. Her sister Sidonie, four years her senior, died at the age of nine of scrofula. Her brother Emanuel, to whom she was devoted, suffered from a rheumatic heart condition from which he eventually died in early adulthood. That Klein and her eldest sister, Emilie Reizes , were never close, made the illnesses and deaths of her two beloved siblings even more traumatic.

Klein made the decision to study medicine at the age of 14. With the help of Emanuel, who coached her in Greek and Latin, she passed the entrance exam to the Vienna Gymnasium, at that time the only school that prepared girls for university. But at the age of 19, she became engaged to Arthur Klein, an industrial chemist. Dazzled by his brilliance, she shelved her own plans to study medicine and during the period of their engagement studied art and history instead at the University of Vienna. They married when she was 21.

The following years were not satisfying ones for Klein. Her husband's work took them from one small industrial town to another. Despite the joy brought by the birth of two children, Melitta in 1904 and Hans in 1907 (a third child, Eric, would be born in 1914), she longed for the intellectual world she had left behind in Vienna.

In 1910, the family settled in Budapest, marking an important turning point for Klein. By chance, she picked up the book On Dreams by Sigmund Freud, and her intellectual life was reborn. Klein immediately embarked on a study of the new science of psychoanalysis and in 1914 entered analysis with Sandor Ferenczi, who became her first mentor. It was under his tutelage that she began analyzing children in 1919. Klein presented her first paper on child development to the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society on July 19, 1919. (The paper was expanded and published as "The Development of a Child.") Later that year, she was elected a member of the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society.

Klein met Karl Abraham, who was deeply impressed with her work, while attending the 1920 meeting of the Psychoanalytic Congress in The Hague. When Abraham invited her to practice in Berlin, Klein separated from her husband in January 1921 (they divorced in 1923) and moved there with her three children. The five years that Klein worked and studied in Berlin were important ones. It was here, under the auspices of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society and with the support of Karl Abraham, that she began developing new therapeutic techniques and clinical insights that would affect the study of early childhood development forever.

From the time that Klein began analyzing her first patient, five-year-old "Fritz," she observed that children expressed fantasies and mastered their anxieties through play. She theorized that the elements of juvenile play were similar to the symbolic language of dreams. Accordingly, Klein began to apply the same technique of free association to children that Freud had used to uncover the unconscious in adults. By analyzing and interpreting play, she believed she could gain access to the child's unconscious. Thus her revolutionary technique of "play analysis" was born.

Until the time that Melanie Klein began constructing her theories, analysts had been unsure how to apply psychoanalytic techniques to children. As Klein herself realized, many of the mental conditions normally necessary for psychoanalysis seem to be absent in children. Yet it was precisely these differences in the infantile mind and the adult mind that led her to develop the technique of play analysis. As Klein wrote:

By means of Play Analysis we gain access to the child's most deeply repressed experiences and fixations and are thus able to exert a radical influence on its development. … The whole kaleidoscopic picture, often to all appearances quite meaningless, which children present to us in a single analytic hour—the content of their games, the way in which they play, the means they use … and the motives behind a change of game … all these things are seen to have method to them and will yield up their meaning if we interpret them as dreams. … For play is a child's most important medium of expression.

An illustration of Klein's technique is contained in her account of the analysis of three-year-old Peter, a child who was strongly fixated upon his mother and difficult to manage. During the first hour, Peter "took the toy carriages and cars and put them first one behind the other and then side by side, and alternated this arrangement several times. He also took a horse and carriage and bumped it into another, so that the horses' feet knocked together, and said: 'I've got a new brother called Fritz.'" She then recounted how the child bumped two horses together, laid them down, covered them up with bricks and declared "Now they're quite dead; I've buried them." The child proceeded to play aggressively, knocking down the cars and horses and carriages. Klein interpreted the child's initial placement of the cars end to end as symbolizing his father's powerful penis. The horses bumped together represented parental intercourse, and the death of the horses symbolized the rage he felt at having on occasion witnessed his parents' coitus. The repeated falling over of the toys represented the child's own feelings of impotency.

Based on such clinical observations, Klein began to construct a theory of early childhood psychological development. From the beginning, she was interested almost exclusively in the internal conflicts and mechanisms affecting development, paying little attention to external factors such as home life and school life. (This exclusiveness remains a strong criticism of her work.) Her insights into infantile sexuality were, however, remarkable, and over the course of her life she continued to modify and expand them.

Klein traced childhood anxieties back to the infant's primitive ambivalent relationship with the mother, in particular a part of the mother's body, the breast. Early on, Freud had noted that an infant's first relationship is to the breast. Klein elaborated this point by attaching even greater significance to the development of object relations. She observed, for example, that in small children object relations (both real and fantasy objects) play an important role in the structure of the child's self.

According to Klein, an infant's relationship to its mother, who represents its whole world during the first months of life, is from the start one of both love and hate. The mother is the sole source of contact, comfort and food, and the child therefore demands her continuous presence and exclusive love. That its demands are not satisfied is a source of frustration which eventually leads to feelings of persecution and gives rise to aggression which is expressed through the desire to bite or devour cannibalistically. These hostile feelings in turn produce anxiety, which the child attempts to minimize through a process of introjection, projection, and splitting—a stage of development Klein termed the "persecutory phase."

Klein believed that a child introjects parts of the parents' bodies (first the breast and later the penis and other parts) into himself, often splitting them into ideal and persecutory objects, e.g. a gratifying "good breast" and a frustrating "bad breast." The child's relation to these internalized parts is extremely complex, involving elements of reality and fantasy. The goal for the child is to retain the introjected "good" parts, thus creating an idealized internal object, and project the "bad." She believed these processes were an important and natural part of a child's development and that they "participate in the building up of an ego and superego that prepare the groundwork for the onset of the Oedipus complex." Her views came to be known as "an object relation theory" due to the importance she placed on external and internal objects.

Klein's theory of "part objects" was, to some extent, a modification of Freud's theory of the superego. Freud described an internal object created when a child introjects his father, making him a part of himself. This internalized figure, the superego, is a figure of conscience responsible for self-observations and criticism, punishment and setting up goals. Klein's theory of part objects pointed to a superego that appeared much earlier and was far more complicated. Klein departed from Freud's belief that the construction of the superego occurred as a consequence of the Oedipus complex, insisting instead that the superego was a part of the Oedipus complex and was even evident in children much younger than five or six years of age, the period to which Freud ascribed the onset of the Oedipus complex. In fact, Klein came to believe that even a child under the age of a year could begin to experience and exhibit anxiety brought on by the beginning of the Oedipus complex.

In 1923, Klein analyzed her youngest patient, two-and-a-half year old "Rita," a child who suffered from pavor nocturnus (night terrors) and obsessive behavior. In Rita, she traced the source of her night terrors to the child's fantasies of parental intercourse and the Oedipal attacks she made toward her mother which, for the child, culminated in a terrifying fantasy of maternal retribution. It was precisely Klein's insistence that

very young children have a rich, often sadistic, fantasy life that ignited the controversy that would always surround her work. Many analysts continued to believe in the innocence of early childhood and were reluctant to attribute to children such complex and sophisticated perceptions.

During Klein's years in Berlin, her theories and investigations into early childhood anxiety increasingly evoked dissention and controversy. Though she received sharp criticism, the influence of her discoveries was far-reaching. Karl Abraham, still one of Klein's most vocal advocates, declared at a meeting in 1924 that "the future of psychoanalysis lies in play techniques." Earlier that year, she had persuaded Abraham to take her on as a patient, and with him she continued the analysis she began with Ferenczi. However, 14 months later, Abraham died. Klein was deeply affected by the loss of her friend and mentor. More important, the loss of his support found Klein increasingly at odds with members of the Berlin Psycho-Analytic Society.

In 1925, at the invitation of Ernest Jones, Klein spent three weeks in London delivering a series of lectures to members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Here she found a more receptive audience for her ideas. In 1926, when Jones invited her to move to England and work in the British Psychoanalytic Society, she accepted. Klein became the first continental European analyst admitted to the Society. With the support of Jones, her work flourished, and she began to train and supervise other analysts eager to learn her techniques.

The years from 1926 to 1936 were productive ones for Klein. In London, there was lively interest in the early stages of development, and her work was generally held in high esteem. In the early 1930s, Klein began analyzing adults as well. She found immense value in analyzing adults and children simultaneously, and much of her later theoretical conclusions were influenced by her work with adults. Her book The PsychoAnalysis of Children, published in 1932, elicited excitement and praise from her colleagues. In an enthusiastic review published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Edward Glover wrote: "In two respects her book is of fundamental importance for the future of psychoanalysis. It contains not only unique clinical material gathered from first-hand analytic observations of children, but lays down certain conclusions which are bound to influence theory and practice of analysis for some time to come."

In 1935, Klein introduced the concept of the "depressive position" which marked a crucial development in her theories. In the depressive position (a stage which follows the persecutory phase), the child begins to see and love the mother as a whole and separate object, rather than as part-objects. Thus, the child undergoes an important process of integration. The mother is now seen as an integral, external figure who embodies positive as well as negative traits. The growing integration of the ego is necessary so that the infant can begin to distinguish the external world and understand its contradictory nature. The anxiety produced is of a depressive nature as "the synthesis between the loved and hated aspects of the complete object gives rise to feelings of mourning and guilt."

By the mid-to-late 1930s, Klein's theories dominated the Society causing some members to view her work with increasing suspicion and hostility. At the same time, an influx of German-Jewish analysts from the Continent (first from Berlin, then Vienna) poured into London, including an ailing Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna. Anna Freud had begun analyzing children around the same time as Klein. However, she and Klein had distinct differences in technique and theory. Klein maintained that the most effective method of analyzing children was to reproduce the classic technique used with adults, and that close attention must be paid to the child's transference of negative impulses to the analyst. Anna Freud strongly believed, on the contrary, that standard psychoanalytic technique should be modified in the case of children and that the analyst should exert an educational influence over the young patient as well as work to gain the child's confidence. Moreover, Anna Freud dismissed the possibility of the transference situation occurring with a child since she regarded its emotional attachment to its parents as too complete. Their theoretical disputes widened the rift at the institute. A group of pupils, who became known as the "Kleinians," flocked to Klein championing her work with an almost fanatical zeal. An oppositional group formed, polarizing the institute. Ernest Jones, in an attempt to diminish the raging professional disagreements, initiated a series of discussions at the British Psycho-Analytical Society aimed at clarifying Klein's views. These occurred in 1943 and 1944 and came to be known as the "Controversial Discussions."

Despite the controversy raging around her, Klein continued to work feverishly in these years, producing some of her most important works. In 1942, she had introduced the term "paranoid-schizoid position" for the first time in an article entitled "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms." The term denoted a further definition of the part-object phase of infantile development and emphasized the fact that the process of splitting and persecutory anxiety during the first few months of life coexisted with the mechanism of introjecting part objects. Klein believed that paranoia and schizophrenia in adulthood originates in this early period of development when persecutory anxiety interferes with the gradual formation of the ego.

Melanie Klein analyzed her last child patient in the late 1940s, but continued to treat adults and train students at the British Psycho-Analytical Society. In 1957, at the age of 75, she wrote Envy and Gratitude, her last major contribution to psychoanalytic theory. The book is an important study in early oral envy and the mutual interactions of envy, jealousy and greed. Shortly afterwards, she began work on one of her most ambitious works, "Narrative of a Child Analysis," a day-by-day account of her 1941 psychoanalysis of "Richard," a ten-yearold boy suffering from acute anxiety and depression. Klein believed that by presenting such a complete analytical record she could illustrate her therapeutic techniques more clearly and thus lay to rest certain misconceptions that she believed surrounded her work. Published posthumously, it remains a fascinating, detailed account of the process of psychoanalysis.

Melanie Klein remained actively engaged in intellectual debates, in writing, teaching and research even as her health began to decline. Following surgery to remove a malignancy, she died of a pulmonary embolus on September 22, 1960, at age 78.