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Melanie Klein (; ; Reizes; 30 March 1882 – 22 September 1960) was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalysis known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein's work primarily focused on the role of ambivalence and moral ambiguity in human development. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existentialism anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, which resulted in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences. The quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distresses a person experiences later in life.R. D. Hinshelwood: Clinical Klein, Basic Books, 2003,
At the age of 21, she married an industrial chemist, Arthur Klein, and soon after gave birth to their first child, Melitta. Klein then had her second child, Hans, in 1907 and her third and final child, Erich, in 1914. After having those two additional children, Klein suffered from clinical depression as these pregnancies took a toll on her. This and her unhappy marriage soon led Klein to seek treatment. Shortly after her family moved to Budapest in 1910, Klein began a course of therapy with psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. It was during their time together that Klein developed an interest in the study of psychoanalysis.
Encouraged by Ferenczi, Klein began her studies by observing her own children. During this time, there was little documentation on the topic of psychoanalysis in children. So, Klein took advantage of this by developing her "play therapy". According to Klein, play is symbolic of unconscious material that can be interpreted and analyzed in the same way that dreams and free associations are in adults. Later, her research contributed to the development of play therapy.
By observing and analyzing the play and interactions of children, Klein built on the work of Freud's unconscious mind. Her dive into the unconscious mind of the infant yielded the findings of the early Oedipus complex, as well as the developmental roots of the superego.
Klein's theoretical work incorporates Freud's belief in the existence of the death drive, reflecting the notion that all living organisms are inherently drawn toward an "inorganic" state, and therefore, somehow, towards death. In psychological terms, Eros (properly, the life drive), the postulated sustaining and uniting principle of life, is thereby presumed to have a companion force, Thanatos (death drive), which seeks to terminate and disintegrate life (although Freud never used the term 'Thanatos' in his own writing). Both Freud and Klein regarded these "bio-mental" forces as the foundations of the psyche. These primary unconscious forces, whose mental matrix is the id, spark the ego—the experiencing self—into activity. Id, ego, and superego, to be sure, were merely shorthand terms (similar to the instincts) referring to highly complex and mostly uncharted Psychodynamics operations.
Klein states that maternal bond are built on more than feeding and developing the infant's attachment; the mother's attachment and bond with her baby is just as important, if not more. Klein came to this conclusion by using actual observations of herself and mothers that she knew. She described how infants show interest in their mothers' face, the touch of their mothers' hands, and the infants' pleasure in touching their mothers' breast. The relationship is built on affection that emerges very soon after birth. Klein says that as early as two months, infants show interest in the mother that goes beyond feeding. She observed that the infant will often smile up at the mother and cuddle against her chest. The way the infant reacts and responds to their mother's attitude and feelings, the love and interest which the infant shows, accounts for an object relation.
Klein also goes on to say that infants recognize that their achievements, such as crawling and walking, give their parents joy. In one observation, Klein says that the infant wishes to evoke love and pleasure in their mother with their achievements. Klein says that the infant notices that their smile makes their mother happy and results in the mothers attention. The infant also recognizes that their smile may serve a better purpose than their cry.
Klein also talks about the "apathy" baby. She says that it is easy to mistake a baby that enjoys their food and cries a little for a happy baby. Development later shows that some of these easy-going babies are not happy. Their lack of crying may be due to some kind of apathy. It is hard to assess a young person's state of mind without allowing for a great complexity of emotions. When these babies are followed up on we see that a great deal of difficulty appears. These children are often shy of people, and their interest in the external world, play, and learning is inhibited. They are often slow at learning to crawl and walk because there seems to be little incentive. They are often showing signs of neurosis as their development goes on.
After exploring ultra-aggressive fantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very young and disturbed children, Melanie Klein proposed a model of the human psyche that linked significant oscillations of state, with the postulated Eros or Thanatos pulsations. She named the state of the mind in which the sustaining principle of life dominates the depressive position. A depressive position is the understanding that good and evil things are one. The fears and worries about the fate of the people destroyed in the child's fantasy are all in the latter. The child tries to repair his mother through phantasm and behavior therapy, overcoming his depression and anxiety. He employs phantasies representing love and restoration to restore the others he destroyed. Morality is based on the standpoint of depression. Klein named it the depressive position because the efforts to restore the integrity of the damaged object are accompanied by depression and despair. After all, the child doubts whether it can fix everything it hurts. Many consider this to be her most significant contribution to psychoanalytic philosophy. She later developed her ideas about an earlier developmental psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of life, which she called the paranoid-schizoid position. Klein coined the term "paranoid-schizoid defense" to emphasize how the child's worries manifest as persecution fantasies and how he defends himself against persecution by separating. The paranoid-schizoid position developed at birth is a common psychotic condition.
Klein's insistence on regarding aggression as an important force in its own right when analyzing children brought her into conflict with Freud's daughter Anna Freud, who was one of the other prominent child psychotherapists in continental Europe but who moved to London in 1938 where Klein had been working for several years. Many controversies arose from this conflict, and these are often referred to as the controversial discussions. Battles were played out between the two sides, each presenting scientific papers, working out their respective positions and where they differed, during war-time Britain. A compromise was eventually reached whereby three distinct training groups were formed within the British Psychoanalytical Society, with Anna Freud's influence remaining largely predominant in the US.
According to Klein, events such as wars affect the course of child development. A shift occurs from a paranoid-schizoid position to a depressive position. The paranoid-schizoid position is characterized by splitting the self and other into dichotomous good and evil with little ability to integrate the two or to recognize the relativity of these terms.
Klein's approach differed from Anna Freud's ego-psychology approach. Klein explored the interpersonal aspect of the structural model. In the mid-1920s, she thought differently about the first mode of defense. Klein thought it was expulsion while Freud speculated it was repression (Stein, 1990). Klein suggested that the infant could relate—from birth—to its mother, who was deemed either "good" or "bad" and internalized as archaic part-object, thereby developing a phantasy life in the infant. Because of this supposition, Klein's beliefs required her to proclaim that an ego exists from birth, enabling the infant to relate to others early in life (Likierman & Urban, 1999).
In Klein's theory, there is an important distinction between envy and jealousy: "Jealousy is based on love and aims at the possession of the loved object and the removal of the rival; envy is the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable—the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it."
Envy is directed towards the creative capacity of the good object that is both loved and hated. The infant envies the breast (the good object) that feeds and comforts them, and wants to spoil and destroy its goodness. This sadistic impulse arises from a kind of pain stemming from the infant's inability to satisfy its own needs.
Excessive envy can impede the transition to the depressive position because the individual cannot develop the capacity to feel concern for and repair the damaged good object. Clinically, this manifests in the continued use of splitting and other primitive defense mechanisms.
According to Klein, excessive envy hinders treatment in two ways:
Envy can jeopardize the therapeutic relationship and the healing process because the patient becomes unable to accept the analyst's help. In the therapeutic process, the analysis of envious feelings and the development of the capacity for gratitude are key to successful treatment.
Klein's concepts still hold great importance in contemporary psychoanalytic practice, especially in the treatment of severe personality disorders and narcissistic structures. Clinicians use Klein's conceptual framework to understand and work with the patient's envious feelings.
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As a solution, Dinnerstein proposed that men and women equally share infant and childcare responsibilities. She argues that if men shared childcare equally with women, they would be equally involved in the phantasies associated with infancy's paranoid and depressive worries. There would then be no way out of dealing with these anxieties and creating a more realistic attitude toward both men and women.Sayers, J. (2013). The autobiography of Melanie Klein. Psychoanalysis and History, 15(2), 127–
163. https://doi.org/10.3366/pah.2013.0130
Dinnerstein, Dorothy (1987). The rocking of the cradle and the ruling of the world. London: Women's Press. . This book became a classic of U.S. second-wave feminism and was later translated into seven languages."Dorothy Dinnerstein; Feminist Writer Was 69"(Obituary). The New York Times. 19 December 1992. Retrieved 2 April 2011.
Feminists critical of Klein's work have drawn attention to an unwarranted assumption of a natural causality connecting sex, gender and desire, stereotypical gender descriptions and in general a prescriptive normative privileging of heterosexual dynamics.O'Connor, Noreen and Ryan, Joanna 'Klein: the Phantasy that Anatomy is Destiny' in Shelley Saguaro (ed) Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader, London: Macmillan 2000
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