Klein, Melanie

(1882-1960)

An Austrian-born, second-generation psychoanalyst, trained under Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest and Karl Abraham in Berlin. She moved to London in 1926 and became a major figure in British and world psychoanalysis , the founder, within the British Psychoanalytic Society, of the Kleinian school.

Her innovations in technique were to analyse young children, substituting play for verbal free-association; to explore the importance of counter-transference-the analyst's feelings about the client; and to undertake the analysis of psychotics. She developed a more elaborate theory of the emotional life of the young baby than did Sigmund Freud. Her argument was that all infants progress through two positions: a paranoid-schizoid position, where bad feelings are projected into the external world, which is then felt to be threatening; and a depressive position, when these feelings are reintegrated into the personality. Thus everybody has the experience of, and at least the distant possibility of regressing to, madness. She gave a clinical meaning to Freud's concept of the death instinct, dealing with it as destructive envy (hatred), and emphasized the role of unconscious fantasy.

Over recent years her work has been drawn on for purposes of social criticism. For example, her analysis of the early stages of development can be used to understand characteristics of the modern personality (see, The Minimal Self, 1984), and her concern with the play of love and hate has been used to supplement critical theory (see, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory, 1989). Her most important papers can be found in, The Selected Melanie Klein (1986). See also Object Relations Test.