Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein (Vienna, 1882 - London, 1960) was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst and writer, best known for her work in child analysis. Starting from the ideas of Sigmund Freud, she developed one of the most influential strands of object relations theory, and she is regarded as a central figure in that tradition.

She was born Melanie Reizes into a Jewish family in Vienna. Her father, Moriz, a doctor, had broken away from the religious path that had been planned for him as a rabbi, and her mother, Libussa, had a strong hold on her emotional life. Her sister Sidonie, who died when Melanie was four, had introduced her to reading and arithmetic. Her brother Emanuel backed her when, as a teenager, she wanted to study medicine. At twenty-one she married the chemist Arthur Klein and had three children, Melitta, Hans and Erich. Repeated pregnancies and an unhappy marriage led to a long depression, and in 1914 she began analysis with Sándor Ferenczi in Budapest. He encouraged her interest in children, and she began by observing her own.

In the years that followed she worked in Budapest and then in Berlin, where Karl Abraham took her on and remained her analyst until his death in 1925. In 1924, at the Salzburg congress, she presented her technique for analysing very young children, built on play, which let the child's play stand in for much of what a grown patient would say. In 1926 she settled in London at the invitation of Ernest Jones, and her work soon became the subject of sharp debate with Anna Freud's circle, which held a different view of how child analysis should be done.

Her central ideas concern the fantasy life of early infancy. Klein argued that the baby relates from the start to part-objects, experienced as good or bad, and that these experiences are taken inside to form the inner world. She described an early stage, the paranoid-schizoid position, in which the child splits the world into good and bad, and a later one, the depressive position, in which the child comes to see that the same person can be both, bringing guilt and a wish to repair the harm done. In her last major book, Envy and Gratitude (1957), she separated envy from jealousy and gave gratitude a key role in counteracting envy.

Her influence was considerable in British psychoanalysis, where she gave rise to the Kleinian school. Her notions of internal objects and psychic positions remain part of clinical practice and of contemporary psychoanalytic thought.