Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein (b. 1882–d. 1960) was one of the most influential psychoanalysts and a significant innovator of psychoanalytic theory in the twentieth century. She is particularly known as a pioneer of child psychoanalysis and for her original ideas regarding what she described as the inner realities of modern individuals. She designed the play technique as a therapeutic tool for children. While her work was deeply grounded in Sigmund Freud’s writings, she developed his ideas into her own influential, yet controversial, school of thought. She was born in 1882 and spent her early life in Vienna as the youngest of four children born to Moriz Reizes (b. 1828), a doctor from an orthodox Jewish family from Lemberg, Galicia, and Libussa Deutsch (b. 1850), his young wife from a more liberal Jewish Slovakian family. Klein suffered the early loss of her older sister and brother, who both died prematurely—an experience that shaped her own psychology and her intellectual interest in mourning and its effect on the self. Klein hoped to study medicine in Vienna, but instead, in 1903 at the age of 21, she married an industrial chemist named Arthur Klein and soon gave birth to Melitta in 1904, Hans in 1907, and Erich in 1914. The family moved to Budapest in 1910, where Klein began psychoanalytic treatment for depression with Sándor Ferenczi, prompted in part by her unhappy marriage. She became interested in psychoanalysis as a profession, and, with Ferenczi’s encouragement, she focused on the analysis of children. In 1921, she separated from her husband and moved to Berlin. There, Klein entered a second psychoanalysis with Karl Abraham, who became her protector in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society, supporting her ideas on child analysis against the reservations of other members. A year after Abraham’s death in 1925, Klein moved to London at the invitation of Ernest Jones and with the enthusiastic support of members of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) for her work with children. Klein became a leading figure among both medical and lay professionals. After the rise of Nazism, the spread of antisemitism, and the influx of refugees from Vienna—including Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud—Klein found herself, during World War II, in the midst of fierce debates (known as the Anna Freud–Melanie Klein Controversial Discussions) in the BPAS over differences in child psychoanalysis in her own work versus that of Anna Freud. During the debate, Klein’s own daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, was among those who attacked her mother’s work. Throughout her years in Britain, Klein continued to practice and wrote influential publications until she died in London in 1960. She had a profound influence on the development of psychoanalysis and other fields. She made an innovative contribution to representing the internal world as an emotional situation, and she introduced or reintroduced terms such as object relations, psychical positions, phantasy, anxiety, splitting, love and hate, projective identification, and the centrality of the mother. Below, the focus in this article is on key publications divided by content and special attention is paid to writings that are of interest not only to clinicians but also to scholars in the humanities.