Klein, Melanie (1882—1960)
Austrian-born child psychoanalysis and leading exponent of object relations theory. She was born in Vienna into a family of middle-class, non-practising Jews. She married young, which prevented her from completing her studies at the University of Vienna. In 1910 she moved with her husband and family to Budapest, which is where she encountered psychoanalysis for the first time. She even got to meet Freud, Sigmund in 1917. She trained as an analyst with Freud’s friend Sándor Ferenczi, and began her own practice in 1919. After meeting Karl Abraham she moved (with his encouragement) to Berlin in 1921, where she practised for five years. Due to her rivalry with Freud, Anna, Berlin proved an unhappy city to practise in, so when Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones suggested she move to London she leapt at the chance. She lived the rest of her life there and became a central figure in British psychoanalytic circles. She trained a number of quite eminent psychoanalysts, including Hanna Segal, Wilfred Bion, and Herbert Rosenfeld. Klein pioneered a form of ‘play therapy’ as a way of psychoanalysing children too young to verbalize their thoughts in feelings the way adults do in the process Freud called ‘free association’. A detailed account of her technique is given in Narrative of Child Analysis (1961), which is an extensive case history of one patient, known as little Richard or little Dick. Both Lacan, Jacques and Deleuze, Gilles are highly critical of Klein’s interpretation of her patient’s play, pointing out that she is a little too willing to see children’s toys as symbols. Yet, it also has to be said, both theorists draw on her work for their own conceptual inventions. Her principal contribution to psychoanalytic theory is the concept of the part-object, which is central to the development of object relations theory. Klein argued that the child initially perceives its mother as a disconnected series of part-objects, centring on the breast as its primary source of nutrition. But the child is ambivalence about the breast because sometimes it gets food from it and sometimes it is denied food, so it splits the breast into a ‘good’ object and a ‘bad’ object. As the child grows up it has to learn to integrate these two objects and recognize the mother as a whole person. The former ambivalence induces feelings of guilt which the child then tries to make reparations for. This is a constant cycle for Klein. Further Reading: P. Grosskurth Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (1986). J. Kristeva Melanie Klein (2004). H. Segal Melanie Klein (1992).