Melanie Klein

Introduction

Melanie Klein (March 30, 1882 – September 22, 1960) was an Austrian-born psychoanalyst who spent the second half of her life in London and became one of the principal architects of object relations theory. Building on Sigmund Freud's work while departing from it in important respects, she argued that the infant's mind is organized from the first months of life around internalized relationships with others, and that these internal objects, rather than drive discharge alone, shape later personality and pathology.

Her second major innovation was technical. Klein treated children's play as the equivalent of free association in adults, which allowed her to conduct analyses of very young children at a time when many analysts doubted that this was possible. The combination produced a body of theory, including the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and the mechanism of projective identification, that made her the most influential and the most disputed child analyst of the twentieth century.

Klein had no university degree and no medical training; she entered psychoanalysis through personal analysis and clinical work, and she was unusual among the major figures of the field in that respect. Her ideas split the British Psychoanalytical Society in the early 1940s and remain an organized school of thought rather than a settled consensus.

Early Life and Education

Klein was born Melanie Reizes in Vienna, the youngest child of a Jewish family; her father was a physician. She had hoped to study medicine, but her marriage at nineteen to Arthur Klein, a chemical engineer, ended those plans, and the marriage itself was unhappy. Her twenties were marked by depression and by the deaths of her father and of a brother, losses that biographers have connected both to her later theoretical interest in mourning and to her decision to seek treatment.

She moved to Budapest with her husband, and there, from about 1912, entered analysis with Sándor Ferenczi, one of Freud's closest associates. In 1914 she read Freud's On Dreams and turned seriously toward psychoanalysis. Ferenczi encouraged her interest in children, and she began analyzing her own children, work that would later be cited against her by critics who questioned the evidential basis of her earliest conclusions.

The paper that resulted, based on the analysis of her son Erich, was read to the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society in 1919 and led to her election as a member. At the 1920 congress in The Hague she met Karl Abraham, who judged her work important enough to invite her to Berlin. She moved there in 1921 and became a member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society, entering analysis with Abraham, a relationship cut short by his death in 1925. By then she had separated from her husband.

Academic and Professional Career

In 1925 Klein was invited to London by Ernest Jones, then president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, to give a series of lectures. She moved permanently to England in 1926 and became a full member and, from 1929, a training analyst of the British Society. During the next decade her ideas were taken up enthusiastically; colleagues used her concepts when they found them useful without any sense that doing so marked a party allegiance.

Her book The Psycho-Analysis of Children appeared in 1932 and was widely praised, including by Edward Glover, who would later become her fiercest critic; he wrote at the time that it contained unique clinical material and conclusions bound to influence analytic theory and practice for some time. In 1935 she introduced the concept of the depressive position, and in 1946, in a paper on schizoid mechanisms, the paranoid-schizoid position and projective identification.

The arrival in London of Freud and his daughter Anna Freud, along with other Viennese and Berlin analysts fleeing the Nazis, changed the situation. Two incompatible approaches to child analysis now shared one institution, and disagreement over technique and theory hardened into faction. The rupture was not only institutional. Klein's own daughter Melitta, who had trained as an analyst at the Berlin Institute and practised in London under the name Melitta Schmideberg, became one of the most persistent critics of her mother's work — a family quarrel that ran alongside, and cannot be separated from, the theoretical one.

Between 1941 and 1945 the Society held the series of scientific meetings known as the Controversial Discussions; the four papers defending Kleinian positions were delivered between January 1943 and March 1944, and the last of them was Klein's own, on the emotional life and ego development of the infant with special reference to the depressive position. The Society avoided a split through a 1946 agreement establishing separate Freudian, Kleinian and Middle Group training tracks. The compromise was institutional rather than intellectual: no position was adjudicated, and each school thereafter trained its own students in its own idiom, which is why the disagreement has never been resolved.

Klein continued working into her seventies. Envy and Gratitude appeared in 1957 and Narrative of a Child Analysis, a detailed record of her wartime treatment of a ten-year-old patient, posthumously in 1961. She died in London in 1960.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Play Technique

Klein's method rested on a claim about children: that they are capable of transference, and that their play expresses unconscious phantasy in the way dreams and free associations do for adults. She equipped the consulting room with small, plain toys and treated their arrangement, destruction and rearrangement as symbolic material to be interpreted. This allowed analysis of children far younger than had been thought possible, and it established play therapy as a distinct clinical form. The same assumption later drew the objection that interpretation of this kind is imposed rather than discovered, particularly with preverbal children.

Internal Objects and the Positions

Klein held that the mind is built out of internalized relations with others. The infant, in her account, relates from birth to part-objects, above all the mother's breast, which is split into a gratifying and a frustrating version because the immature ego cannot yet hold both together. This earliest organization she called the paranoid-schizoid position: anxiety is persecutory, and the characteristic defenses are splitting, projection and introjection.

With maturation the infant comes to recognize that the good and bad object are one person, and enters the depressive position. Integration brings with it guilt, mourning and the wish to repair the damage phantasized in earlier attacks, and Klein treated the capacity for reparation as the foundation of concern for others. Donald Winnicott, who was not a Kleinian, judged the concept of the depressive position to be as significant for psychoanalysis as the discovery of the Oedipus complex.

Projective Identification

In her 1946 paper Klein described a mechanism in which parts of the self are split off and projected into another person, who is then experienced and unconsciously pressured to conform to what has been projected. The concept proved to be one of the most productive in later psychoanalysis; it was extended by Wilfred Bion into a theory of how one mind contains and transforms another's experience, and it became central to clinical work with severe personality disorder.

The concept acquired its name later than the idea, and the lag matters for how the paper is read. In the 1946 version of "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms" the process is described in full, but the term "projective identification" appears only once, in a passing remark about the weakening of the ego through excessive splitting; the defining sentence, "I suggest for these processes the term 'projective identification'," was added only to the 1952 revision published in Developments in Psycho-Analysis. Because Kleinians have conventionally cited the 1952 version as "1946", the later, more systematic statement is usually read as the original one. Klein's unpublished notes from 1946–47, examined by Elizabeth Bott Spillius in the Melanie Klein Trust archive and reported in Projective Identification: The Fate of a Concept, refer to the paper as "my article on splitting", which suggests the mechanism emerged as a corollary of splitting rather than as a separate discovery. Spillius also records Hanna Segal's recollection that the term was proposed to Klein by Roger Money-Kyrle and that Klein did not much like it.

Envy and the Death Drive

Klein accepted Freud's notion of a death drive and gave aggression a constitutive role in development, which was one of the points that most scandalized her critics. In Envy and Gratitude she treated envy as an innate expression of that drive, directed at the goodness of the object that feeds and comforts the infant, and distinguished it from greed, which aims to devour, and jealousy, which is based on love and aims at possession.

The death drive is the element that divides her successors rather than her critics. The 2018 volume Envy and Gratitude Revisited (Routledge), written largely by analysts working inside the Kleinian tradition, records the split plainly. Peter Fonagy and Shmuel Erlich defend Klein's emphasis on innate constitutional factors over external ones; Ronald Britton keeps the concept but prefers the term "destructive instinct", argued to be directed outwards first and internalised only later. Robert Caper rejects it outright, calling an instinct "built into the mind that is aimed precisely and exclusively at killing the mind" untenable, and reads envy instead as a defence against endangered narcissism; Henry Smith objects to what he sees as Klein's moralised polarity of pure goodness against pure envy; Caroline Polmear, writing from the Independent tradition, drops the death drive and places destructiveness later in development. What survives across all of them is the clinical description of envy; what does not is the metapsychological machinery Klein used to explain it.

Major Publications

The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932) — the systematic statement of the play technique and of her theory of early development. It is the book that established child analysis as a distinct clinical form and that set out the claim, radical at the time, that children are capable of full transference and can be analysed from a very early age.
Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1921–1945 (1948) — the collected papers covering the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, including the 1935 paper on manic-depressive states and the 1946 paper introducing projective identification, the concept that later proved the most productive for analysts working with severe personality disorder.
Envy and Gratitude (1957) — a short late book in which envy is treated as an innate expression of the death drive directed at the goodness of the object that feeds and comforts the infant, and carefully distinguished from greed, which aims to devour, and jealousy, which is based on love and aims at possession.
Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961) — the near-verbatim record, with commentary, of the analysis of a single ten-year-old patient across ninety-three sessions, published as evidence for her interpretive method. It has been criticised for the same reason it was written: a reader cannot separate the child's material from the analyst's interpretation of it.
The Writings of Melanie Klein (1975–1984) — the four-volume standard edition of her complete works, issued posthumously and now the reference text for scholarly citation.

Impact and Legacy

Klein's influence runs through object relations theory, attachment research, and contemporary work with severe disturbance. Her ideas were developed by Bion, Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld, and they shaped later clinical frameworks for borderline and narcissistic conditions. Her emphasis on the quality of early relationship, rather than on the management of drives, as the central fact of development is the premise that most later relational theories share.

The criticisms are equally substantial and come from several directions. During the Controversial Discussions, Glover and the Viennese group argued that Klein's theories were not an extension of Freud but a radical revision unsupported by clinical evidence, that they displaced the Oedipus complex, and that they discounted the role of real experience in favor of inferred meaning. Glover's specific objection was methodological: he accused the Kleinians of inferring earlier experiences from current behaviour even in the face of negative evidence, and of a psychic anthropomorphism that confused concepts of the psychical apparatus with actual mechanisms and then called both phantasy. Anna Freud held that infants pass through an initial narcissistic and autoerotic phase in which objects barely register, and that a child's tie to its parents is too complete for the kind of transference Klein described; she also favored an educational role for the analyst, which Klein rejected as not analysis at all. Later critics, including John Bowlby, argued that phantasy was given priority over observable caregiver-infant interaction and that real deprivation was thereby underweighted, and feminist writers such as Nancy Chodorow criticized the assumption that maternal care is the sole axis of early development.

The general methodological worry is that retrospective reconstruction from analytic material cannot distinguish what the child experienced from what the analyst's theory predicts. The worry is sharper for Klein than for most analysts because her claims are about the earliest months — a period the analyst never observes, and to which the patient has no verbal access — and because the theory is rich enough to accommodate any observation. A child who attacks a toy is expressing aggression; a child who is gentle is defending against it; a child who does neither is showing inhibition. Each is a confirmation, and nothing is a refutation, which is the defining property of an unfalsifiable system rather than an empirical one.

The same problem attaches to her own evidential base. Klein's first and most important cases were her own children, and she analysed and wrote about them at a time when her theory was being constructed. Critics have argued that the analyst's theory shaped the material rather than emerging from it, and that no independent check on the accuracy of her reconstructions is available even in principle.

There is also a question about what the theory would need in order to be tested. Klein's claims about the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions are developmental: they say when something happens and what follows if it does not. These are, in outline, empirical claims about infancy, and they have never been operationalised in a way that would let observation decide them. Contemporary infant research has shown that newborns are far more socially competent than mid-century psychology assumed, that they engage in turn-taking and respond to caregivers from the first weeks, and that early relationships are genuinely formative — findings that Kleinians reasonably cite as vindication. But that research supports the general claim that infants are relational. It does not support, and was not designed to test, specific claims about splitting of the breast, innate envy, or the timetable of the positions. The vindication is real and it is much weaker than it is usually taken to be.

Kleinians and their sympathizers answer on several of these points. Susan Isaacs's paper in the Discussions argued that ordinary observations, of an infant's response to its mother's voice in the first month and of the handling, poking and tearing typical of play after six months, confirm the existence of the phantasies Klein described, and Kleinians maintained that their technique makes otherwise inaccessible material observable. Defenders also point out that the analytic situation supplies repeated, checkable evidence over time rather than a single retrospective inference, and that Winnicott's and Bowlby's own theories, however critical, presuppose an infant who is actively related from early on. On the charge of gender essentialism, the reply is that Klein described the mother-infant relation as she encountered it clinically rather than prescribing it, though critics find that distinction hard to sustain. Modern defenders add that research on early intersubjectivity and on the neurobiology of early relationships has given independent support to the general claim that infants are engaged in complex relational processes from birth, while conceding that this does not confirm Klein's specific formulations.

She is still being read rather than merely cited. Paul Garvey's introductory study Melanie Klein appeared with Routledge in 2023, and Cintra and Ribeiro's edited volume Why Read Klein? The Importance of Melanie Klein's Work for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, its chapters organised around unconscious phantasy, the two positions, the feminine position, envy and gratitude, and the technical developments of projective identification. Such volumes are evidence of a living school rather than of external validation: they show the framework still generating new clinical problems, which is a different claim from the one about its evidential standing.

Learn More

Sigmund Freud — whose theory of the drives Klein extended and substantially revised
Anna Freud — her principal opponent in the Controversial Discussions over child analysis
Donald Winnicott — the independent object relations theorist who judged the depressive position Freud's equal
John Bowlby — who took up the importance of early relationship while rejecting Klein's phantasy-based account

References

Klein, M. (1932). The Psycho-Analysis of Children. Hogarth Press.