Our Adult World and its Roots in Infancy

A lecture Melanie Klein gave at Manchester University in May 1959 for an audience of non-specialists, published the same year in Human Relations and later collected in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. In it Klein sets out her main ideas in plain terms and argues that adult character, relationships and social attitudes bear the mark of the infant's first relation to the mother. She traces into adult life the processes she had described in infancy: splitting and projection, envy and greed, persecutory and depressive anxieties, and the capacity for gratitude and reparation. She then extends these ideas from the individual to groups and to social life. The Melanie Klein Trust recommends the paper as a clear introduction to her thought and as a straightforward outline of the paired concepts of envy and gratitude.