Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein, (born March 30, 1882 – died September 22, 1960), was an Austrian psychotherapist, who building upon the classic psychoanalytic theory, constructed therapeutic techniques for children that influenced development of present methods of child care and rearing.
Life
Melanie Klein (nee Reisez) was born in Vienna, in 1882. Her father, Dr. Moriz Reisez, was a successful physician. He had rebelled against his family’s wishes to become a rabbi, and instead finished medical school and opened a private practice. At the age of 40 he married Libusa Deutsch, who bore him four children, Melanie being the youngest.
Melanie had a happy childhood, filled with the discovery of both knowledge and art. Despite being Jewish, religion played little role in her life. She always labeled herself as an atheist. However, she never forgot her roots, and frequently appealed to parents to teach their children their own religious beliefs.
She had a very close relationship with her siblings, especially Emmanuel and Sidonie. Emmanuel was Melanie's older brother, who tutored her in Greek and Latin and who introduced her to the intellectual circles of Vienna. Her sister Sidonie, on the other hand, taught Melanie [[reading and writing. Both siblings left their mark on her early life, and when they both died prematurely, Melanie became seriously depressed, something that remained a characteristics of her personality throughout her life. Her father died when she was 18. Melanie remained close to her mother, Libusa, who died in 1914.
At age 19, Melanie became engaged to her brother's friend, Arthur Klein, and at age 21 she married him. He was an engineer, and had to travel a lot as part of his job. During this time she bore him two children, Melitta in 1904, and Hans in 1907. Melanie followed her husband wherever he went, but as a result, could never complete an academic degree, although she had aspirations to go to medical school. Instead, she studied languages and read books. Later in her career, Klein regretted not being able to complete a degree, as she was often not respected in academic circles due to her lack of credentials.
The Kleins moved to Budapest in 1910, where for the first time she encountered the work of Sigmund Freud. From that year on, she dedicated herself to studying and practicing psychoanalysis. In 1914, she gave birth to her third child, and she became especially interested in studying children. Klein met Freud in person in 1917, and wrote her first paper The Development of a Child, in 1919. That same year she became a member of the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society. After her husband's job took him to Sweden, Melanie moved with her three children to Slovakia, and decided to file for divorce. In 1922, the divorce was final.
In 1921, Klein met Karl Abraham, who inspired her to continue to work with children. She moved to Berlin, Germany, where she opened a psychoanalytic practice for both children and adults. She especially focused on emotionally disturbed children, and continued with this practice until 1926. However, as the psychoanalytic school in Germany developed, it also became somewhat differentiated from schools in other parts of Europe. Different psychoanalysts developed and used different techniques in their practice. When Anna Freud started her own work with children, it became obvious that Klein’s approach differed from that of Anna Freud, and Klein was slowly pushed out of Berlin’s academic circle.
Thus, in 1927, together with her children, Klein moved to England. She gave series of lectures in London, and was warmly welcomed. She became a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, and soon opened a private practice. In England she developed her ideas on the death instinct and Oedipus complex. She remained in England until her death in 1960.
Work
Klein's theoretical work gradually centered on a highly speculative hypothesis proposed by Sigmund Freud, that life is an anomaly—that it is drawn toward an inorganic state, and therefore, in an unspecified sense, contains an instinct to die. In psychological terms, Eros, the sustaining and uniting principle of life, is postulated to have a counterpart, Thanatos, which seeks to terminate and disintegrate life.
Based on her examination of extremely aggressive fantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very young and very ill children, Klein put forth the interpretation that the human psyche constantly oscillates between positions in which Eros or Thanatos is in the fore. The unstable psychological state, corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of Thanatos, she called the "paranoid-schizoid" position. She called the state of the psyche dominated by Eros, the sustaining principle of life, the "depressive" position, since in this state the individual has recognized ambivalent feelings and moderated, or depressed, their intensity.
Conflict with Freud
Klein's insistence on regarding fear and aggression as important forces in children's psychological development brought her into conflict with Sigmund Freud, who emphasized sexual forces over all others, and later with his daughter, Anna Freud, who had become a major figure in child psychotherapy. Many controversies arose from this conflict, eventually leading to a split between the Freudian and Kleinian groups of analyists within the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Object Relations Theory
"Object relations theory" is the idea, developed by Sigmund Freud, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and Melanie Klein, that the self, exists only in relation to other "objects," which may be external or internal. Internal objects are internalized versions of external objects, primarily formed from early interactions with the parents. In another words, a child’s first object of desire is his caregiver, for child can only satisfy his or her needs through that object. The relationship between a child and a caregiver, and the way child satisfies his needs are eventually internalized into mental representations. Accroding to object relations theory, there are three fundamental mental representations between the self and the other: attachment, frustration, and rejection. These representations are universal emotional states, and are the major building blocks of personality.
The central thesis in Melanie Klein's object relations theory was that the objects can be either part-object or whole-object, i.e. a single organ (such as a mother's breast) or a whole person (the mother). Both the mother or just the mother's breast can be the locus of satisfaction for a drive. Depending on the nature of the relationship between child and caregiver, the child can develop various disturbances, as an excessive preoccupation with certain body parts or preoccupation with parts versus a whole person. According to Klein's theory, a situation in which a child did not receive sufficient nurturing care increased the likelihood that the child would retreat into a make-believe world filled with imaginary objects, generated in an attempt to satisfy the need for real objects.
Projective Identification
Melanie Klein first introduced the term "Projective identification" in 1946, referring to a psychological process in which a person projects thoughts or beliefs that they have onto a second person. The second person is affected by the projection and begins to behave as though he or she were actually characterized by those projected thoughts or beliefs. It is generally believed that this process happens outside of the conscious awareness of both parties involved.
Projective identification is believed to be a primitive psychological process and is understood to be one of the more primitive defense mechanisms. Yet is also thought to be the basis out of which more mature psychological processes like empathy and intuition are formed.
The content of projection is often an intolerable, painful, or dangerous idea or belief about the self, which person simply cannot tolerate. For example, a traumatized patient might describe to his or her analyst a traumatic incident. Yet in describing this incident the patient remains emotionally unaffected or even indifferent to their own suffering and perhaps even the suffering of loved ones. When asked, they deny having any feelings about the event whatsoever. Yet, when the analyst hears this story, he or she begins to have very strong feelings, perhaps of sadness or anger, in response, thereby acting out the patient's feelings resulting from the trauma. By acknowledging to the patient that the experience is evoking these feelings in response to their account of the trauma, the analyst helps the patient to recognize the painful emotions or thoughts that previously could not be let into awareness.
Play Therapy
Klein developed a technique of "play therapy" for use with children, building on Sigmund Freud’s method of free association. She believed that, since children cannot express themselves easily through such verbal associations, they could through play and art. Thus, children could project their feelings. allowing their unconscious fantasies and hidden emotions to come out in their play and drawings. Klein believed that therapists could use play to relieve negative, aggressive feelings in children, and thus treat children suffering from emotional disorders.
The interpration of play therapy was one of the major areas of disagreement between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. Klein used it to uncover unconscious conflicts underlying children's dysfunctional behavior. By contrast, Anna Freud regarded play therapy as educational for children, helping them to adapt to reality. She did not believe that it revealed any unconscious conflicts.
Legacy
Melanie Klein made significant contributions to the field of psychology. She de-emphasized the importance of biological drives, particularly the sexual drive, and emphasized the importance of interpersonal relationships in the psychoanalytic field. She particularly stressed the importance of the mother-child relationship in child development. Her technique of play therapy, which she developed for use with children, continues to be widely used.
Her greatest accomplishment was the Object Relations Theory (Hergenhahn, 2001). Object relations theory continued to be developed in the 1940s and 1950s by British psychologists, and became known as the Ronald Fairbairn, D.W. Winnicott, Harry Guntrip, and others. Recent decades in developmental psychological research, for example, on the onset of a Theory of Mind (understanding that others have minds with separate beliefs, desires and intentions) in children, have found that the formation of mental world is enabled by the infant-parent interpersonal interaction, which was the main thesis of British object-relations tradition (e.g. Fairbairn, 1952).
Until the 1970s few American psychoanalysts were influenced by the school of Melanie Klein, on the one hand, who constituted an opposite polarity to the school of Anna Freud (which dominated American psychoanalysis in 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s and was represented in the US by Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Rapaport, Erikson, Jacobson, and Mahler), and, on the other hand, the "middle group" who fell between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and was influenced by the British schools of Michael Balint, Donald Winnicott, and Ronald Fairbairn. The strong animosity in England between the school of Anna Freud and that of Melanie Klein was transplanted to the US, where the Anna Freud group dominated totally until the 1970s, when new interpersonal psychoanalysis arose partly from ideas of culturalist psychoanalysis, influenced also by Ego psychology, and partly by British theories which have also entered under the broad terminology of "British object relations theories".
Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, were the first to apply psychoanalytic theories to treat affective disorders in children, although their approaches were radically different. Their differences led to conflicts and division among child psychoanalysts that persisted for decades.
The Melanie Klein Trust, founded in 1955, continues to promote research and training in Klein's methods.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
Alford, C.F. (1990). Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory. Yale University Press
Bion, W. (1991). Experiences in Groups. Routledge. ISBN 0415040205
Grosskurth, P. (1987). Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work, Karnac Books
Hinshelwood, R. (2003). Introducing Melanie Klein (2nd Ed.), Totem Books. ISBN 1840460695
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. In Money-Kyrle, R., Joseph, B., O'Shaughnessy, E. & Segal, H. (Eds.).(1984). The writings of Melanie Klein. Vol III. London: The Hogarth Press.
Klein, M. (2002). Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921-1945. Free Press. ISBN 074323765X
Likierman, M. (2002). Melanie Klein, Her Work in Context. Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 0826457703
Ogden, T.H. (1979), On projective indentification. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60: 357-373.
Ogden, T. (1986). The Matrix of the Mind. Object Relations Theory and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue. Northwale, NJ: Jason Aronson. ISBN 1568210515
Rose, J. (1993). Why War? - Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein. Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0631189246
Spillius, E.B.(1988). Melanie Klein Today. (2 Volumes.). Routledge. ISBN 0415006767 & ISBN 0415010454
External Links
Melanie Klein official website
Women's Intellectual Contributions to the Study of Mind and Society: Melanie Klein
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