Melanie Klein

For more information on Melanie Klein, visit Britannica.com.

The Austrian psychotherapist and child psychologist Melanie Klein (1882-1960) developed methods of play technique and play therapy in analyzing and treating child patients.

Melanie Klein was born in Vienna on March 30, 1882. 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, the year in which she became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society. 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 Sept. 22, 1960, she treated adults, analyzed students of psychoanalysis, taught, and wrote.

Further Reading

For further information on Melanie Klein's work and thought see Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (1964). Ives Hendrick treats Mrs. Klein's work briefly in "Child Analysis and Child Psychiatry" in his Facts and Theories of Psychoanalysis (1934; 3d rev. ed. 1958). A useful study which surveys the field from 1933 on is Dieter Wyss, Depth Psychology: A Critical History, Development, Problems, Crises (1961; trans. 1966).

Additional Sources

Segal, Julia, Melanie Klein, London; Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1992.

Grosskurth, Phyllis, Melanie Klein: her world and her work, Northvale, N.J.: J. Aronson, 1995.

1882-1960

Melanie Klein, British psychoanalyst, was born in Vienna on March 30, 1882, and died on September 20, 1960, in London.

Klein came from a traditional, though not orthodox, Jewish background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her school-age ambition to become a doctor was never realized, due to her complicated relationship with her dominant and intrusive mother, who, Klein felt, favored her brother. She therefore had no university education, but read widely and independently in subjects that interested her.

Her older sister died when Klein was four years old. She lost her brother Emmanuel when she was twenty, one year before her marriage to Arthur Klein, a chemical engineer.

Klein was close to her mother in an ambivalent relationship which caused her periods of considerable depression. Her experience of death and bereavement continued when her mother died in 1914, a few months after Klein's third child was born. These events coincided also with her husband being conscripted into the army. Klein's three children were born in 1904, 1907, and 1914.

She had become acquainted with psychoanalysis the year before, and shortly after the traumatic events of 1914, she sought analysis with Sándor Ferenczi, who worked with her until 1917. He was away from Budapest at times on military duty, and her analysis was probably interrupted. Ferenczi encouraged her to take an interest in the psychoanalytic understanding of children, as he was interested in following up Freud's "Little Hans" case. Klein began an investigation of her own children. She presented a paper in 1919 detailing these preliminary studies to the Hungarian Psycho-Analytical Society, and was made a member. However, later that year she left Hungary because of anti-Semitism and the post-war political turmoil. She traveled with her children to Berlin, while her husband worked in Sweden. They were essentially divorced from this point. In Berlin she developed her observational technique and a rigorous interpretive psychoanalysis with child patients. She went into analysis with Karl Abraham, who left an enduring mark on the development of her psychoanalytic ideas.

Klein then met Alix Strachey, who was also in analysis with Abraham. Strachey was very impressed by the presentations that Klein made to the Berlin Society (Strachey, 1986) and they became friends. Alix Strachey reported her impressions to her husband James and through this link Melanie Klein arranged to come to London to give a series of lectures in 1925. Her work was greatly appreciated in the British Psycho-Analytical Society. This was the first time her efforts had met with such acclaim; when she was invited to come permanently to London, she agreed with little hesitation. She arrived in 1926, and her children came soon after. She was very happy in the first years. She found strong support from most of her colleagues in London before Anna Freud developed a different form of child analysis (1927) and criticized Klein's (Grosskurth, 1986).

Klein's clinical skill had a profound effect on the quality of the work of the whole Society. She was very much a teacher and innovator. Something of a backlash began however, shortly before she read her paper on the depressive position in 1935. Edward Glover, who also been analyzed by Abraham and who was at the time analyzing Klein's daughter Melitta, began controversial debate, disputing her work and her conclusions and suggesting that she was no longer practicing psychoanalysis.

When Anna Freud moved to London with her father in 1938 after Germany had annexed Austria, Klein became very worried that her own work would be jeopardized. She was resolute in standing by her ideas, and the Society arranged a series of lectures in 1943 to debate the nature and value of Melanie Klein's discoveries and ideas. The outcome of these "Controversial Discussions" was a stalemate, which allowed both Klein and Anna Freud to develop separate schools of psychoanalysis within the British Society. The majority of the British psychoanalysts formed a middle or independent group aligned to neither Freud nor Klein.

Klein's first major contribution was to create a method of child analysis which extended the tentative attempts of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (1921). Her new technique was characterized by her astute and detailed clinical observation, and by her view that an analysis of a child demanded as rigorous an interpretative method as an adult analysis. This produced material which partly confirmed the theoretical notions that Freud had inferred in the development of children. But she described them in much greater detail and could point to significant modifications.

She found evidence to disagree with Freud on some points: firstly, she was forced to conclude that the libidinal phases were not conveniently separated in time, but instead there was much overlap; secondly, the Oedipus complex was active in a very primitive form from the earliest phases, and was colored by oral and anal impulses as well as genital ones; and thirdly, the super-ego did not supersede the Oedipus complex but probably preceded it also in a very primitive and harsh form. These conclusions remain contentious (Hinshel-wood, 1991).

Her later descriptions of the depressive position and paranoid-schizoid positions were entirely original, and have long provoked intense debate. The patterns of anxiety, defenses, and relationships which these positions represent are now quite widely accepted. And certain elements of them, notably "projective identification," is of great importance in the teaching of many institutes and schools of psychoanalysis.

Klein always gave her allegiance to Freud's theory of the death instinct, and the early observations she made of the aggression and fear that children suffer promoted the view, against Freud, that this instinct is not clinically silent. Her last major contribution, the notion of "primary envy," brought the death instinct clearly under clinical observation.

All of Melanie Klein's conclusions, as well as her technique, have been and remain hotly debated. However, her views have been increasingly discussed—and understood. There are large and growing groups of psychoanalysts in many countries who would now regard her work as standard psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Freud, Anna. (1927). Introduction to the technic of child analysis. (L. Pierce Clark, Trans.). New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Grosskurth, Phyllis. (1986). Melanie Klein. Her world and work. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 501 p.

Hinshelwood, Robert. (1994). Clinical Klein. London, Free Association Books.

Hug-Hellmuth, Hermine. (1921). On the technique of child analysis. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 2, p. 287-305.

Klein, Melanie. (1975). The writings of Melanie Klein. London, Hogarth, 4 vol.

Segal, Hanna. (1964). Introduction to the work of Melanie Klein. London, Heinemann; republ. 1973, London, Hogarth; repr. 1988, London, Karnac Books.

Spillius, Elisabeth. (1988). Melanie Klein today. London, Routledge.

—ROBERT D. HINSHELWOOD

Part of a series of articles on

Psychoanalysis

Concepts Psychosexual development Psychosocial development Conscious Preconscious Unconscious Psychic apparatus Id, ego, and super-ego Libido Drive Transference Countertransference Ego defenses Resistance Projection Denial

Important figures Alfred Adler Michael Balint Wilfred Bion Nancy Chodorow Erik Erikson Ronald Fairbairn Sándor Ferenczi Anna Freud Sigmund Freud Erich Fromm Harry Guntrip Karen Horney Ernest Jones Carl Jung Melanie Klein Heinz Kohut Jacques Lacan Margaret Mahler Otto Rank Wilhelm Reich Harry Stack Sullivan Susan Sutherland Isaacs Donald Winnicott

Important works The Interpretation of Dreams Beyond the Pleasure Principle Civilization and Its Discontents

Schools of thought Self psychology Lacanian Object relations Interpersonal Relational Ego psychology

Psychology portal

v • d • e

Melanie Klein (March 30, 1882 – September 22, 1960) was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had a significant impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis. She was a leading innovator in theorizing object relations theory.

Contents 1 Life 2 Thought 3 Literature 4 In popular culture 5 External links 6 Notes

Life

Born in Vienna of Jewish parentage^[1], Klein first sought psychoanalysis for herself with Sandor Ferenczi when he was living in Budapest during World War I. There she became a psychoanalyst and began analysing children in 1919. In 1921 she moved to Berlin where she studied with and was analysed by Karl Abraham. Although Abraham supported her pioneering work with children, neither Klein nor her ideas received much support in Berlin. However, impressed by her innovative work, British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones invited Klein to come to London in 1926, where she worked until her death in 1960.

Klein had a major influence on the theory and technique of psychoanalysis, particularly in Great Britain. As a divorced woman whose academic qualifications consisted of not even having earned a bachelor's degree, Klein was a visible iconoclast within a profession dominated by male physicians.

After the arrival of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalyst daughter, Anna, in London in 1938, Klein’s ideas came into conflict with those of Continental analysts who were migrating to Britain. Following protracted debates between the followers of Klein and the followers of Anna Freud during the 1940s (the so-called 'controversial discussions'), the British Psychoanalytical Society split into three separate training divisions: (1) Kleinian, (2) Anna Freudian, and (3) independent. This division remains to the current time.

Apart from her professional successes, Klein’s life was full of tragic events. Allegedly the product of an unwanted birth, her parents showed her little affection. Her much loved elder sister died when Klein was four, and she was made to feel responsible for her brother’s death. Her academic studies were interrupted by marriage and children. Her marriage failed and her son died, while her daughter, the well-known psychoanalyst Melitta Schmideberg, fought her openly in the British Psychoanalytic Society. Mother and daughter were not reconciled before Klein's death, and Schmideberg did not attend Klein's funeral.

Thought

Although she questioned some of the fundamental assumptions of Sigmund Freud, Klein always considered herself a faithful adherent to Freud's ideas. Klein was the first person to use traditional psychoanalysis with young children. She was innovative in both her techniques^[2] (such as working with children using toys) and her theories in infant development. Strongly opinionated, and demanding loyalty from her followers, Klein established a highly influential training program in psychoanalysis. She is considered one of the co-founders of object relations theory.

Klein's theoretical work gradually centered on a speculative hypothesis eventually accepted by Freud, which stated that life may be a fragile occurrence, that it is drawn toward an inorganic state, and therefore, in an unspecified sense, contains a drive towards death. In psychological terms Eros (properly, the life instinct), the postulated sustaining and uniting principle of life, is thereby presumed to have a companion force, Thanatos (death instinct), which allegedly seeks to terminate and disintegrate life. Both Freud and Klein regarded these biomental forces as the foundations of the psyche. These were human instincts ("Triebe") unrelated to the animal instincts of ethology. These primary unconscious forces, whose mental matrix is the "id," sparked the ego—the experiencing self—into activity. Id, ego, and superego—to be sure—were merely shorthand terms (like the "instincts") referring to highly complex, mostly uncharted, psychodynamic operations. Freud and Klein never abandoned the terms or the conceptualizations despite protests and controversies by many of their adherents.

While Freud’s ideas concerning children mostly came from working with adult patients, Klein was innovative in working directly with children, often as young as two years old. Klein saw children’s play as their primary mode of emotional communication. After observing troubled children play with toys such as dolls, animals, plasticine, pencil and paper, Klein attempted to interpret the specific meaning of play. She realised that parental figures played a significant role in the child’s phantasy life, and considered that the chronology of Freud’s Oedipus complex was imprecise. Contradicting Freud, she concluded that the superego was present long before the Oedipal phase.

After exploring ultra-aggressive phantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very young, very ill children, Melanie Klein proposed a model of the human psyche that linked significant oscillations of state, with whether the postulated Eros or Thanatos instincts were in the fore. She named the state of the psyche, when the sustaining principle of life is in domination, the depressive position. The psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of life she called the paranoid-schizoid position.^[3]

Klein's insistence on regarding aggression as an important force in its own right when analysing children brought her into conflict with Freud's own daughter, Anna Freud, who was one of the other prominent child psychotherapists working in England at that time. Many controversies arose from this conflict, and these are often referred to as the controversial/scientific discussions.

Today, Kleinian psychoanalysis is one of the major schools within psychoanalysis. Kleinian psychoanalysts are members of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Kleinian psychoanalysis is claimed to be the predominant school of psychoanalysis within Britain, in much of Latin America, and with the possible exception of Lacanianism, in much of continental Europe. Within the United States of America, the Psychoanalytic Center of California is the major training center that follows the work of Melanie Klein. Kleinian psychoanalysis with adults is characterized by a very traditional technique using an analytic couch and meeting four to five times a week. Kleinian analysis focuses on interpreting very "deep" and primitive emotions and phantasies.

Literature

Melanie Klein's works are collected in four volumes:

• "The collected Writings of Melanie Klein"
  • Volume 1 - "Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921-1945", London: Hogarth Press.
  • Volume 2 - "The Psychoanalysis of Children", London: Hogarth Press.
  • Volume 3 - "Envy and Gratitude", London: Hogarth Press.
  • Volume 4 - "Narrative of a Child Analysis", London: Hogarth Press.

Other books on Melanie Klein:

• Robert Hinshelwood, Susan Robinson, Oscar Zarate, Introducing Melanie Klein, Icon Books UK 2003
• Robert Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, Free Association Books UK 1989
• Robert Hinshelwood, Clinical Klein, Free Association Books UK 1993
• Mary L Jacobus, "The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein", Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-19-924636-X
• Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) tr. Ross Guberman, Columbia University Press, 2004
• Donald Meltzer (Information in French) "The Kleinian Development (New edition)", Publisher: Karnac Books; Reprint edition 1998, ISBN 1-85575-194-1
• Donald Meltzer : "Dream-Life: A Re-Examination of the Psycho-Analytical Theory and Technique" Publisher: Karnac Books, 1983, ISBN 0-902965-17-4
• Meira Likierman, "Melanie Klein, Her Work in Context" Continuum International, Paperback, 2002
• Hanna Segal (Information in French):
  • "Klein" Publisher: Karnac Books; Reprint edition (1989) ISBN 0-946439-69-9
  • "The Work of Hanna Segal: A Kleinian Approach to Clinical Practice (Classical Psychoanalysis and Its Applications) " Publisher: Jason Aronson, 1993), ISBN 0-87668-422-3
  • "Dream, Phantasy and Art" Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition 1990, ISBN 0-415-01798-X
  • Interview
  • Transcript of a seminar titled "Motivation: the artist and the psychoanalyst"
• John Steiner (Information in French) : "Psychic Retreats" (...) relative peace and protection from strain when meaningful contact with the analyst is experienced as(...), Publisher: Routledge; 1993, ISBN 0-415-09924-2
• C. Fred Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory, Yale UP 1990
• Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1986, ISBN 1-56821-445-6
• Jacqueline Rose, Why War?-- Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein, Blackwell Publishers 1993
• Herbert A Rosenfeld (Information in French): * "Impasse and Interpretation: Therapeutic and Anti-Therapeutic Factors in the Psycho-Analytic Treatment of Psychotic, Borderline, and Neurotic Patients", Publisher: Tavistock Publications, 1987, ISBN 0-422-61010-0
• Julia Segal: (1992). Melanie Klein. London: Sage. ISBN 0-8039-8477-4
• Ronald Britton: "Sex, Death, and the Superego: Experiences in Psychoanalysis", Publisher: Karnac Books; 2003, ISBN 1-855-759489
• Ronald Britton: "Belief and Imagination", Publisher: Taylor & Francis LTD; 1998, ISBN 0-415-194385
• Monique Lauret et Jean-Philippe Raynaud, "Melanie Klein, une pensée vivante", Presses Universitaires de France, 2008, ISBN 13 9782130570394

In popular culture

Melanie Klein was the subject of a 1988 play by Nicholas Wright, entitled Mrs. Klein. Set in London in 1934, the play involves a conflict between Melanie Klein and her daughter Melitta Schmideberg, after the death of Melanie's son Hans Klein. The depiction of Melanie Klein is quite unfavorable. In the original production at the Cottesloe Theatre in London, Gillian Barge played Melanie Klein, with Zoe Wannamaker and Francesca Annis playing the supporting roles. In the 1995 New York revival of the play, Melanie Klein was played by Uta Hagen, who described Melanie Klein as a role that she was meant to play.^[4] The play was broadcasted on the British radio station BBC 4 in 2008 and revived at the Almeida Theatre in London in October 2009 with Claire Higgins as Melanie Klein.

External links

• Biography, psychoanalytic techniques, theory
• Melanie Klein Trust

Notes

1. ^ Concise Dictionary of National Biography
2. ^ Horacio Etchegoyen: The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique, Karnac Books ed., New Ed, 2005, ISBN 185575455X
3. ^ Robbins, B.D. & Goicoechea, J. (2006). It must be remembered that these two positions are highly complex chronological, developmental, and current states of mind that cannot be reduced to any simple formulation. The psychogenesis of the self and the emergence of ethical relatedness: Klein in light of Merleau-Ponty. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 25,(2), 191-223.
4. ^ Ben Brantley,"Theater Review: Uta Hagen returns, tossing Wine," New York Times, October 25, 1995.

v • d • e Attachment theory Theory Affectional bond • Attachment in adults • Attachment in children • Attachment disorder • Attachment measures • Attachment parenting • Attachment theory • Human bonding • Maternal deprivation • Object relations theory • Reactive attachment disorder Notable theorists Mary Ainsworth • John Bowlby • Erik Erikson • Sigmund Freud • Harry Harlow • Jerome Kagan • Melanie Klein • Konrad Lorenz • Nikolaas Tinbergen • Rene Spitz Controversy Attachment therapy • Candace Newmaker Clinical applications Attachment-based therapy (children) • Attachment-based psychotherapy

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)