K lein, M elanie

Melanie Klein (1882 – 1960) was an Austrian‐born, British psychoanalyst whose theories about early infant attachments helped establish fields within psychoanalysis devoted to children and object relations theory. Klein worked first in Vienna and Berlin before settling in London in 1926. Like her contemporary, Anna Freud, Klein significantly modified Freud's theories. Her theories shifted the focus away from the Freudian emphasis on the little boy and the Oedipal complex (the stage of his development associated with sexual awareness) toward the early infant emotions or drives aimed at the mother, especially her breast. Since Klein was directly involved with children, she devised a therapeutic technique involving free play, which stood in opposition to Freudian free association, in order to observe and analyze her young patients. Play theory assumes that through playing games, preverbal children reveal their urges, fantasies, anxieties, and fears. With her own three children, Klein was able to perfect her play technique to help her disturbed young patients. Her theories of normal emotional and psychosexual human development thus originated in her active interactions with infants and not from the adult Freudian patient's recollections of infantile experiences. Klein started publishing her findings in 1921 in the International Journal of Psycho‐Analysis and then published numerous articles and books that were eventually collected and published in four volumes as The Writings of Melanie Klein (1975).