Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein (née Reizes) was born on 30 March 1882 in Vienna, the fourth and youngest child of a Jewish family with deep roots in Galicia and Slovakia. Her father Moriz was a doctor of strict religious observance who had left rabbinical training behind; her mother Libussa came from a Slovakian rabbinical line and was the dominant intellectual presence in the household. She had hoped to study medicine but abandoned the plan when the family's finances collapsed shortly after her father's death, and at 21 she married industrial chemist Arthur Klein, with whom she had three children—Melitta, Hans, and Erich. The marriage was unhappy, made worse by frequent relocations for her husband's work, and a severe bout of postpartum depression led her to begin analysis with Sándor Ferenczi in Budapest in 1910 after the family moved there. The encounter with Ferenczi—who encouraged her to observe her own children and to write up her findings—was the entry point of her psychoanalytic career.

In 1919 she presented a paper based on observations of her own son Erich to the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society and was elected to membership the same year. From 1921 she trained in Berlin under Karl Abraham, the leading European analyst of his generation, and after his early death in 1925 continued her clinical and theoretical work largely without senior supervision. There she developed her distinctive play technique—using toys, dolls, plasticine and drawing as symbolic material equivalent to free association in adult analysis. The technique opened psychoanalytic work with children as young as two and created child psychotherapy as a clinical discipline, decades before it was widely accepted in continental Europe or the United States. At Ernest Jones's invitation she moved to London in 1926 to lecture at the British Psychoanalytical Society, settled there permanently, and became the dominant intellectual figure of British psychoanalysis for the rest of her career.

Theoretically Klein took Freud's death-drive concept literally, arguing that aggression and primitive existential anxiety operate from birth and shape the unconscious before language develops. Her paranoid-schizoid position describes how the infant splits the mother into 'good' and 'bad' breast and uses projective identification—a defence she was the first to systematise—to expel intolerable feelings into the object and then control them from outside. The depressive position, emerging around six months, integrates good and bad objects in the same person, producing guilt for one's own destructive impulses and the wish to make reparation. The transition from one position to the other is, in Klein's view, the developmental signature of psychic maturity, and adults oscillate between the two throughout life. She also contradicted Freud directly by proposing that the Oedipus complex begins much earlier than her teacher had thought, and that the superego is present from birth rather than installed at the resolution of the Oedipal crisis. Her last major work Envy and Gratitude (1957) identified primitive envy as the earliest manifestation of the death drive—directed at the very breast that feeds—and gratitude as the foundation for preserving a good internal object. The book offers a clinical map for narcissistic and psychotic patients still used today.

The shadow side of her career is significant. After Anna Freud arrived in London fleeing Nazi Vienna in 1938, the two women fought a sustained intellectual war over child analysis. Klein insisted that play is fully equivalent to free association and that the superego exists from birth; Anna held that educative intervention is required until the child reaches the Oedipal stage. The Controversial Discussions of 1941-1945, chaired during wartime by Ernest Jones, nearly destroyed the British Psychoanalytical Society. They ended with a three-track training compromise—Kleinian, Anna Freudian, and Independent (Middle Group). Her private life was no less fraught: her daughter Melitta Schmideberg publicly denounced her mother through her own analyst Edward Glover, and Klein was barred from her daughter's funeral. The fact that Klein analysed all three of her own children—an arrangement now seen as a serious dual-relationship ethics violation—and Nicholas Wright's 1988 play Mrs Klein, which implied that her son Hans's 1934 death was suicide rather than a climbing accident, have added to her contested legacy.

Klein died on 22 September 1960 in London from complications following bowel cancer surgery. She had continued teaching, writing and supervising right up to the months before her death, training a circle of British analysts who would carry her ideas into the second half of the century. Her object relations framework, transmitted through Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott, Hanna Segal, Herbert Rosenfeld and John Steiner, became the backbone of British psychoanalysis and now informs contemporary work with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, organisational consulting (the Tavistock tradition), social theory, second-wave feminism (Dorothy Dinnerstein), and—via Julia Kristeva—French philosophy. Jacques Lacan and Deleuze-Guattari criticised her Oedipal framing while drawing freely on her concepts of part-objects and projective identification, and the influence of her thinking reaches into contemporary film theory, literary criticism and even some strands of analytic philosophy of mind. The doctrinal authoritarianism she demanded of followers, the tragedies of her family life, and the depth of her insight into the infant unconscious are inseparable in the portrait of the twentieth century's most contested psychoanalyst.