Life and career
Melanie Klein was born in Vienna in 1882. She came to psychoanalysis as an adult, undergoing analysis with Sándor Ferenczi and later Karl Abraham, who encouraged her pioneering work with children. In 1926 she settled in London, where she became a central and controversial figure in British psychoanalysis. Her disagreements with Anna Freud over the analysis of children culminated in the famous “Controversial Discussions” of the 1940s, which reshaped the British psychoanalytic world into the distinct traditions that still exist today.
The inner world of objects
Klein’s great contribution was object relations theory. She argued that the mind is built from the inside out by internalised relationships, “objects”, beginning with the infant’s relationship to the mother and, more specifically, to the breast as the first source of both nourishment and frustration. The infant, unable yet to grasp the mother as a whole person, experiences a “good” object that satisfies and a “bad” object that frustrates. These internal objects, and the feelings attached to them, form the foundations of the personality.
The paranoid-schizoid position
Klein described two fundamental modes of experience she called positions. The first, the paranoid-schizoid position, belongs to the earliest months. Overwhelmed by feelings it cannot yet manage, the infant keeps the good and the bad radically apart, splitting the world in two, to protect the good from the bad. It is “paranoid” because the bad feels persecuting, and “schizoid” because of the splitting. We never fully leave it behind; we return to it, at any age, under enough stress.
The depressive position
The second, the depressive position, is a developmental achievement. As the infant matures, it begins to recognise that the good and bad objects are the same person, that the mother who frustrates is also the mother it loves. This brings the capacity for concern, guilt and the wish to repair the harm one imagines doing to those one loves. For Klein, reaching the depressive position, and being able to tolerate the ambivalence it involves, is central to psychological health.
Projective identification
Among Klein’s most influential ideas is projective identification: a process in which a person unconsciously puts an unwanted part of the self into another and then experiences it as belonging to that other. It is a more powerful relative of ordinary projection, and it is one of the ways feelings get communicated, and induced, between people. The concept became essential to understanding what happens between patient and analyst, and between people in general.
Play as the child’s language
Klein developed a technique for analysing young children through their play, treating the child’s use of small toys as the equivalent of the adult’s free association. This opened the analysis of childhood in a way that had not been possible before, and made visible the vivid inner dramas of very young children.
Her influence
Klein’s ideas run through much of modern psychoanalysis. They were carried forward and developed by figures such as Wilfred Bion and, in his own direction, Donald Winnicott, and they remain indispensable to any depth understanding of the earliest relationships and the mother. Working with these dynamics, how the inner world was formed and how it can change, is at the heart of Jungian analysis with a Jungian analyst. The Jungian Confrerie is the practice of Dr Philippe Jacquet, in central London and online worldwide.