Article
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.
Main ideas
- Adult character, relationships and social attitudes carry the imprint of the infant's earliest relation to the mother.
- The mechanisms of infancy, splitting and projection, persist into adult life rather than belonging to infancy alone.
- Persecutory and depressive anxieties, and envy and greed, shape the adult's relations to others.
- The capacity for gratitude and reparation, rooted in the first relation to the mother, underlies the ability to love and to repair in later life.
- The same early processes can be traced in groups and in social life.