Melanie Klein

Melanie Reizes was born in Vienna on 30 March 1882, the youngest of four children. Her father, Moriz Reizes, was a doctor from an orthodox Jewish family in Lemberg; her mother was Libussa Reizes, née Deutsch. Her sister Sidonie died in 1886 and her brother Emmanuel in 1902. She passed the gymnasium entrance examinations in 1898 and had long meant to study medicine and become a psychiatrist. At seventeen she became engaged to her second cousin Arthur Klein, a student of chemical engineering, and the engagement ended those plans. They married on 31 March 1903 and had three children: Melitta (1904), Hans (1907) and Erich (1914). The family lived in Rosenberg and Krappitz before moving to Budapest around 1910. In these years Klein suffered recurrent depressions.

In 1914, in Budapest, she read Freud's On Dreams and began an analysis with Ferenczi. She heard Freud speak at the Budapest congress of 1918. In July 1919 she presented a study of her son Erich to the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society, and soon afterwards became a member. The expanded paper, her first publication, appeared in 1921 as Eine Kinderentwicklung³ (in English, The Development of a Child, 1923). In it the boy is called Fritz, and the paper follows his sexual enlightenment.

In the autumn of 1919, during the White Terror, she left Budapest. In 1920 she met Joan Riviere at the congress in The Hague.

Early in 1921 Klein settled in Berlin. She became an associate member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in 1922 and a full member in February 1923. In 1923 she took on her first child analysis, of "Rita", aged two and a half, under Abraham's supervision. In 1924 she treated the children she later called Peter, Ruth, Trude and Erna, and her paper at the Salzburg congress that year was controversial. She began an analysis with Abraham early in 1924; it ended with his death on Christmas Day 1925. She separated from Arthur Klein in April 1924. Alix Strachey came to admire her work. In July 1925, encouraged by Ernest Jones, she gave a series of lectures in London at the Stephens' home in Gordon Square.

In September 1926, at Jones's invitation, Klein settled in London, where she began analysing Jones's wife and children. Her ideas fed directly into Jones's The Early Development of Female Sexuality⁴.

In 1927 Anna Freud's lectures in Berlin set out an approach to child analysis opposed to Klein's, and Jones arranged a symposium in the British Society in reply, to Freud's displeasure. Klein's contribution to the Symposium on Child Analysis² answered Anna Freud point by point. She rejected an educational, reassuring preparatory phase. She held that children develop a full transference, negative as well as positive. And because the child's super-ego was already severe, she argued, child analysis could go as deep as the analysis of adults.

Klein was elected a member of the British Society on 2 October 1927. That year she read Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict⁵ at the Innsbruck congress. In 1929 she began treating "Dick", the subject of The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego⁶, read at the Oxford congress. Her first book, The Psycho-Analysis of Children⁷, appeared in 1932 in German in Vienna and in English from the Hogarth Press, translated by Alix Strachey. Its first part sets out the play technique at different ages; the second sets out her theory of the early super-ego, of Oedipal tendencies in the first year, and of the place of sadism and anxiety in development.

The 1930s brought personal blows. From 1933 her daughter Melitta attacked her publicly and allied herself with Edward Glover. In April 1934 her son Hans died in a mountain accident in the Tatras.

On 16 January 1935 Klein presented A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States⁸, the paper that introduced the depressive position. In the same period she analysed Paula Heimann (from 1935) and Roger Money-Kyrle (from 1936). On James Strachey's advice she supervised Winnicott from 1935, and she also supervised Bowlby in the 1930s. In 1936 she and Riviere gave two public lectures, published together as Love, Hate and Reparation⁹. Klein's part, "Love, Guilt and Reparation", follows how guilt over phantasied harm moves the wish to make reparation, through love, family life, friendship, work and creativity. She presented her paper on mourning at the Paris congress of 1938. Sigmund and Anna Freud arrived in London on 6 June 1938.

On the outbreak of war Klein moved to Cambridge and then to Pitlochry in Scotland (1940–1941). There she revised Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States¹⁰. In late April 1941 she began a four-month analysis of a ten-year-old boy, "Richard". Its session-by-session record, the fullest account of her child technique, was published after her death as Narrative of a Child Analysis¹¹. She returned to London in September 1941.

Between February and June 1942 a series of Extraordinary Meetings of the British Society was held, at which Anna Freud and Glover challenged Klein's views. From 21 October 1942 these gave way to the Controversial Discussions between the Kleinians and the Viennese Freudians around Anna Freud. The discussions opened in 1943 with Susan Isaacs's paper The Nature and Function of Phantasy¹², which set out the Kleinian concept of unconscious phantasy. Glover resigned in January 1944. The last discussion, on 1 March 1944, concerned Klein's paper on the emotional life of the infant.

Segal and Rosenfeld, both analysed by Klein, qualified in 1945. That year Klein published The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties¹³.

On 4 December 1946 Klein read Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms¹⁴, introducing the paranoid-schizoid position and projective identification. In the same year the British Society came to be organised into "A", "B" and "Middle" groups. From about 1946 into the early 1950s she analysed Bion. Her collected papers appeared as Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 1921–1945¹⁵ in 1948.

In 1952, Developments in Psycho-Analysis¹⁶, with papers by Klein, Heimann, Isaacs and Riviere, edited by Riviere and with a preface by Jones, set out Kleinian theory as it stood after the Controversial Discussions. It included Klein's Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant¹⁷ and a revised version of the schizoid mechanisms paper. Meltzer was in analysis with her from 1954 until her death.

On 1 February 1955 she founded the Melanie Klein Trust, with Bion, Heimann, Betty Joseph, Money-Kyrle and Segal as trustees. The same year she, Heimann and Money-Kyrle edited New Directions in Psycho-Analysis¹⁸, a collection marking her seventieth birthday. In July 1955 she read "A Study of Envy and Gratitude" at the Geneva congress. It was among the most controversial of her papers, and with the help of Elliott Jaques she expanded it into the book Envy and Gratitude¹⁹ (1957). In November 1955 she asked Heimann to step down as a trustee, and Heimann left the Kleinian group.

From 1956 she worked with Jaques on organising her notes on Richard. In 1959 she read "On the Sense of Loneliness" at the Copenhagen congress. An autobiography she began in 1953 was left unfinished and was published in 2016. She died of colon cancer on 22 September 1960.

Klein's theory grew out of her technique. In The Psychological Principles of Infant Analysis¹ she argued that play expresses the child's phantasies symbolically, as dreams do, and can be interpreted like free association. She also argued that Oedipal tendencies and a strict super-ego appear far earlier than had been assumed. Looking back in The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique²⁰, she described several elements of the method: the playroom, the child's own set of small toys, and interpretation that includes the negative transference. She also described how the technique led her to her theory of early anxieties, internal objects and positions.

Personification in the Play of Children²¹ showed that the characters children invent in play reduce to a few roles: a persecuting super-ego, the id or ego, and a helping figure. The super-ego, she argued, is split into its identifications and projected outwards; this is the first use of splitting in her work. The analyst has to accept every role offered, including the hostile ones.

In Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict⁵ she dated the onset of the Oedipus conflict and of the super-ego to the frustrations of weaning towards the end of the first year, when oral and anal sadism are at their height. She proposed a "femininity phase" in both sexes, and traced the epistemophilic instinct to curiosity about the mother's body. She pursued that theme in A Contribution to the Theory of Intellectual Inhibition²². In The Psycho-Analysis of Children the early super-ego is harsh and pregenital, against Freud's view that the super-ego is the heir of the Oedipus complex.

The analysis of Dick, a four-year-old whose symbol formation had almost come to a halt, led her to argue that anxiety drives symbol formation by moving interest on to new objects (The Importance of Symbol-Formation⁶). In Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse²³ the wish to make good the injury done to the mother first appears. That wish later became her concept of reparation.

The 1935 psychogenesis paper⁸ introduced the depressive position, which she dated to around the middle of the first year. The infant comes to experience the mother as a whole person who is both loved and hated, rather than as split good and bad part-objects, a notion taken from Abraham's idea of partial love. This brings depressive anxiety and guilt for the loved object, and the wish to make reparation. The paper also described the manic defence, made up of omnipotence, denial and triumphant control. It set reparation within the depressive position and distinguished it from manic reparation.

Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States¹⁰ extended this account to mourning. Normal mourning, she argued, is a modified and transitory manic-depressive state. A real loss revives the fear of having lost the good internal objects, and mourning succeeds by reinstating them; the infantile neurosis is the means by which the depressive position is worked through. Triumph, control and contempt obstruct this Working through. She saw the depressive position as never finally achieved: it is reworked throughout life and alternates with the paranoid-schizoid position.

The 1945 paper on the Oedipus complex, drawing on the cases of Richard and Rita, revised her earlier account in the light of the depressive position. It held that love and the wish for reparation, as well as sadism, shape the early Oedipus situation, and ended with a point-by-point comparison with Freud.

In Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms¹⁴ she described the paranoid-schizoid position of the first three or four months. At this stage an ego that exists from birth, but lacks cohesion, meets persecutory anxiety rooted in the death instinct and felt as a fear of annihilation. It defends itself by splitting both the object and itself, and by idealization, denial and omnipotence. In projective identification, split-off parts of the self, good as well as bad, are projected "into" the mother rather than merely "on to" her, so that she is identified with them; in excess this leaves the ego depleted. The introjected good breast becomes a focal point of the ego. She placed the fixation points of schizophrenia in this position and those of manic-depressive illness in the depressive one, and held that normal splitting is a forerunner of repression. She took the word "schizoid" from Fairbairn, hence "paranoid-schizoid", while rejecting his neglect of anxiety, aggression and the death instinct. The term projective identification appears once in the 1946 paper; the sentence explicitly proposing it as a name was added in the version revised for Developments in Psycho-Analysis.

A Contribution to the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt²⁴ set the two anxieties side by side, against Freud's late theory of anxiety: persecutory anxiety is fear for the self, depressive anxiety is fear and guilt for the object. Some Theoretical Conclusions (1952) gave her most systematic account of the first year. The Origins of Transference²⁵ rooted transference in the earliest object relations and treated it as a "total situation" carried from the past into the present.

In Envy and Gratitude¹⁹, her last major theoretical work, she proposed a primary envy of the good, feeding breast, distinguished it from greed, and paired it with gratitude as an expression of the life instinct.

Within the Kleinian group, Segal became Klein's foremost expositor, in Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein²⁶ and the short study Klein²⁷, and extended her ideas on symbolism in Notes on Symbol Formation²⁸. Rosenfeld's Analysis of a Schizophrenic State with Depersonalization²⁹ was the first clinical paper to use the newly named projective identification, and in Psychotic States³⁰ he extended her account of envy to narcissism. Meltzer's The Kleinian Development³¹ presented Freud, Klein and Bion as stages of one method, and read Narrative of a Child Analysis week by week as the turning point of her thought. Klein also supervised Martha Harris.

Klein's relations with the British independents were close and contested. Winnicott's membership paper "The Manic Defence" drew on her work. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment³² he reworked the depressive position as the capacity for concern; in a 1962 appraisal he credited her contribution but faulted her for underrating the infant's dependence on the environment. Fairbairn drew on her in A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses³³, and she in turn took up his account of schizoid states. Bowlby, whom she had supervised, came to stress real events, separation and loss, against her emphasis on phantasy. Isaacs, whose Malting House School Klein had visited in its first year, gave the Kleinian concept of phantasy its fullest statement.

Beyond Britain, Kernberg drew on her account of primitive defences in his theory of borderline organisation in Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis³⁴, within an ego-psychological framework that he held her theory lacked. In On Projective Identification³⁵ Ogden described her concept as at once an unconscious phantasy, a mode of communication, a primitive object relation and a pathway for psychological change. In The Matrix of the Mind³⁶ he recast the depressive position as the birth of a historical subject, held in continuous tension with more primitive modes of experience. Kristeva devoted the middle volume of her trilogy on female genius, Le Génie féminin: Melanie Klein³⁷, to her, presenting her as the most original innovator in psychoanalysis after Freud and taking up the archaic mother, matricide and the depressive position, themes that run through Kristeva's work from Soleil noir onward.

Klein's first paper was Eine Kinderentwicklung³ (1921). Her early technique and its theory are set out in The Psychological Principles of Infant Analysis¹ (1926), the Symposium on Child Analysis² (1927), Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict⁵ (1928), Personification in the Play of Children²¹ (1929), The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego⁶ (1930) and the book The Psycho-Analysis of Children⁷ (1932).

The depressive position is developed in A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States⁸ (1935), Love, Hate and Reparation⁹ (1937, with Riviere), Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States¹⁰ (1940) and The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties¹³ (1945). The early papers were collected in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 1921–1945¹⁵ (1948).

The later theory is found in Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms¹⁴ (1946), A Contribution to the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt²⁴ (1948), Developments in Psycho-Analysis¹⁶ (1952, with Heimann, Isaacs and Riviere), The Origins of Transference²⁵ (1952), The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique²⁰ (1955) and Envy and Gratitude¹⁹ (1957). Narrative of a Child Analysis¹¹ appeared posthumously in 1961.