kids encyclopedia robot

Melanie Klein facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts
Quick facts for kids
Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein 1952.jpg
Melanie Klein in 1952
Born
Melanie Reizes

(1882-03-30)30 March 1882
Died 22 September 1960(1960-09-22) (aged 78)
London, England
Known for Therapeutic techniques for children
Coining the term 'reparation'
Klein's theory splitting
Projective identification
Children Melitta Schmideberg
Scientific career
Fields Psychoanalysis
Influences Sigmund Freud
Karl Abraham
Influenced

Melanie Klein (née Reizes; 30 March 1882 – 22 September 1960) was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, which resulted in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences. The quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distresses a person experiences later in life.

Life

Melanie Klein c1900
Melanie Klein c. 1900

Melanie Klein was born into a Jewish family and spent most of her early life in Vienna. She was the fourth and final child of parents Moriz, a doctor, and Libussa Reizes. Educated at the Gymnasium, Klein planned to study medicine. Her family's loss of wealth caused her to change her plans.

At the age of 21 she married an industrial chemist, Arthur Klein, and soon after gave birth to their first child, Melitta. Her son Hans followed in 1907 and her second son Erich was born in 1914. While she would go on to bear two additional children, Klein suffered from clinical depression, with these pregnancies taking quite a toll on her. This and her unhappy marriage soon led Klein to seek treatment. Shortly after her family moved to Budapest in 1910, Klein began a course of therapy with psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. It was during their time together that Klein expressed interest in the study of psychoanalysis.

Encouraged by Ferenczi, Klein began her studies by observing her own children. Until this time, only minimal documentation existed on the topic of psychoanalysis in children, Klein took advantage of this by developing her "play technique". According to Klein, play is symbolic of unconscious material and can be interpreted and analyzed in the same way that dreams and free associations are in adults. Her research later contributed to the development of play therapy.

During 1921, with her marriage failing, Klein moved to Berlin where she joined the Berlin Psycho-Analytic Society under the tutelage of Karl Abraham. Although Abraham supported her pioneering work with children, neither Klein nor her ideas received much support in Berlin. As a divorced woman whose academic qualifications did not even include a bachelor's degree, Klein was a visible iconoclast within a profession dominated by male physicians. Nevertheless, Klein's early work had a strong influence on the developing theories and techniques of psychoanalysis, particularly in Great Britain.

Her theories on human development and defense mechanisms were a source of controversy, as they conflicted with Freud's theories on development, and caused much discussion in the world of developmental psychology. Around the same time Klein presented her ideas, Anna Freud was doing the very same. The two became unofficial rivals of sorts, amid the protracted debates between the followers of Klein and the followers of Freud. Amid these so-called 'controversial discussions', the British Psychoanalytical Society split into three separate training divisions: (1) Kleinian, (2) Freudian, and (3) Independent. These debates finally ceased with an agreement on a dual approach to instruction in the field of child analysis.

Contributions to psychoanalysis

Melanie Klein c1927
Melanie Klein c. 1927
A dinner to celebrate Melanie Klein's 70th birthday. Wellcome L0016246
A dinner to celebrate Melanie Klein's 70th birthday

Klein was one of the first to use traditional psychoanalysis with young children. She was innovative in both her techniques (such as working with children using toys) and her theories on infant development. Gaining the respect of those in the academic community, Klein established a highly influential training program in psychoanalysis.

By observing and analyzing the play and interactions of children, Klein built onto the work of Freud's unconscious mind. Her dive into the unconscious mind of the infant yielded the developmental roots of the superego.

Klein's theoretical work incorporates Freud's belief in the existence of the death pulsation, reflecting the notion that all living organisms are inherently drawn toward an "inorganic" state, and therefore, somehow, towards death. In psychological terms, Eros (properly, the life pulsation), the postulated sustaining and uniting principle of life, is thereby presumed to have a companion force, Thanatos (death pulsation), which seeks to terminate and disintegrate life (although Freud never used the term 'Thanatos' in his own writing). Both Freud and Klein regarded these "biomental" forces as the foundations of the psyche. These primary unconscious forces, whose mental matrix is the id, spark the ego—the experiencing self—into activity. Id, ego and superego, to be sure, were merely shorthand terms (similar to the instincts) referring to highly complex and mostly uncharted psychodynamic operations.

Infant observations

Klein’s work on the importance of observing infants began in 1935 with a public lecture on weaning.

Klein states that mother–infant relationships are built on more than feeding and developing the infant’s attachment; the mother’s attachment and bond with her baby is just as important, if not more. Klein came to this conclusion by using actual observations of  herself and mothers that she knew. She described how infants show interest in their mothers' face, the touch of their mothers' hands. The relationship is built on affection that emerges very soon after birth. Klein says that as early as two months, infants show interest in the mother that goes beyond feeding. She observed that the infant will often smile up at the mother and cuddle against her chest. The way the infant reacts and responds to their mother's attitude and feelings, the love and interest which the infant shows, accounts for an object relation.

Klein also goes on to say that infants recognize that their achievements, such as crawling and walking, give their parents joy. In one observation, Klein says that the infant wishes to evoke love and pleasure in their mother with their achievements. Klein says that the infant notices that their smile makes their mother happy and results in the mothers attention. The infant also recognizes that their smile may serve a better purpose than their cry.

Klein also talks about the "apathetic" baby. She says that it is easy to mistake a baby that enjoys their food and cries a little for a happy baby. Development later shows that some of these easy-going babies are not happy. Their lack of crying may be due to some kind of apathy. It is hard to assess a young person's state of mind without allowing for a great complexity of emotions. When these babies are followed up on we see that a great deal of difficulty appears. These children are often shy of people, and their interest in the external world, play, and learning is inhibited. They are often slow at learning to crawl and walk because there seems to be little incentive. They are often showing signs of neurosis as their development goes on.

Object relation theory

Portrait of Melanie Klein & A. Freud (cropped)
Melanie Klein and Anna Freud

Klein is known to be one of the primary founders of object relations theory. This theory of psychoanalysis is based on the assumption that all individuals have within them an internalized, and primarily unconscious realm of relationships. These relationships refer not only to the world around the individual, but more specifically to other individuals surrounding the subject. Object relation theory focuses primarily on the interaction individuals have with others, how those interactions are internalized, and how these now internalized object relations affect one's psychological framework. The term "object" refers to the potential embodiment of fear, desire, envy or other comparable emotions. The object and the subject are separated, allowing for a more simplistic approach to addressing the deprived areas of need when used in the clinical setting.

Klein’s approach differed from Anna Freud's ego-psychology approach. Klein explored the interpersonal aspect of the structural model. In the mid-1920s, she thought differently about the first mode of defense. Klein thought it was expulsion while Freud speculated it was repression (Stein, 1990). Klein suggested that the infant could relate - from birth - to its mother, who was deemed either "good" or "bad" and internalized as archaic part-object, thereby developing a phantasy life in the infant. Because of this supposition, Klein’s beliefs required her to proclaim that an ego exists from birth, enabling the infant to relate to others early in life (Likierman & Urban, 1999).

Influence on feminism

In Dorothy Dinnerstein’s book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976) (also published in the UK as The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the World), drawing from elements of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, particularly as developed by Klein, Dinnerstein argued that sexism and aggression are both inevitable consequences of child rearing being left exclusively to women. As a solution, Dinnerstein proposed that men and women equally share infant and child care responsibilities. This book became a classic of U.S. second-wave feminism and was later translated into seven languages.

Feminists critical of Klein’s work have drawn attention to an unwarranted assumption of a natural causality connecting sex, gender and desire, stereotypical gender descriptions and in general a prescriptive normative privileging of heterosexual dynamics.

See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Melanie Klein para niños

  • Edna O'Shaughnessy
  • Ignacio Matte Blanco
  • Joseph J. Sandler
  • Klein's theory splitting
  • Nina Searl
  • Reparation (psychoanalysis)
  • Object relations theory
  • Symbolic equation
kids search engine
Melanie Klein Facts for Kids. Kiddle Encyclopedia.