A Viennese childhood shadowed by loss
Melanie Reizes was born in Vienna on March 30, 1882, the youngest of four children in a middle-class Jewish family. Her father, Moriz Reizes, had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family from Lemberg (now Lviv) in Galicia and broken away from it to study medicine; in Vienna he struggled to make a living as a doctor, and the family’s finances were tight enough that her mother, Libussa Deutsch Reizes, opened a shop selling plants and exotic animals to help support them.
Death came early and often to the household. Melanie’s sister Sidonie, four years older than her, died of scrofula, a form of tuberculosis, when Melanie was still a small child. Her brother Emanuel, a gifted, restless young man who encouraged her intellectual ambitions and helped coach her for the entrance examination to a Vienna gymnasium, suffered from a heart condition and died in his mid-twenties. Her father died when she was eighteen. Biographers have long seen in this run of bereavements the emotional soil from which her later preoccupation with loss, mourning and guilt would grow.
A medical career that never was
At fourteen Melanie decided she wanted to study medicine, following her father, and perhaps specialise in psychiatry. But at nineteen she became engaged to Arthur Klein, an industrial chemist and a friend of her brother, and the plan was set aside. She attended courses in art and history at the University of Vienna but never took a degree; she would enter her life’s work with no formal university training at all, a fact her critics would later hold against her.
She married Arthur Klein in 1903, at the age of twenty-one. The marriage was unhappy from the start. Arthur’s work took the couple to small industrial towns in what is now Slovakia, where their daughter Melitta was born in 1904; their son Hans followed in 1907 and a second son, Erich, in 1914. Klein suffered long bouts of depression during these years, and her mother’s intrusive presence in the household made matters worse.
Budapest and the discovery of Freud
In 1910 the family moved to Budapest. There Klein came across Sigmund Freud’s writings and found in them something that reawakened her stalled intellectual life. She went into analysis with Sándor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s closest collaborators, who noticed her talent for understanding children and urged her to devote herself to their analysis.
Child psychoanalysis barely existed. Freud had built his theories of childhood largely from the memories of adult patients. Klein began by closely observing her own children, and on July 19, 1919, she presented her first paper, “The Development of a Child” to the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society, which elected her a member that year. But Budapest was turning dangerous. After the collapse of the short-lived Communist regime in 1919, a wave of counter-revolutionary violence fell heavily on Jews, and the city’s psychoanalytic circle began to scatter.
Berlin and the play technique
At the international psychoanalytic congress in The Hague in 1920, Klein met Karl Abraham, head of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society. Early in 1921 she separated from her husband and moved to Berlin; the couple later divorced. Abraham became her mentor and protector, and in 1924 she began a second analysis with him, cut short when he fell ill and died in 1925.
It was in Berlin that Klein developed the method that made her name. She gave her young patients, some barely two years old, small toys: little figures, animals, cars, bricks, as well as paper, pencils, water and plasticine. She treated what they did with them, the building and smashing, the hiding and feeding, as the equivalent of an adult’s free associations, and interpreted its unconscious meaning directly to the child. Play, she argued, was a child’s natural language, and it could be read much as Freud read dreams.
What she found startled her colleagues. The inner world of small children, as she described it, was not innocent but crowded with intense love and violent, frightening fantasies of attack and revenge. She concluded that the Oedipal conflict and the beginnings of a conscience, or superego, appeared far earlier than Freud had supposed, within the first years of life.
London and a new theory of the mind
Her ideas divided Berlin, but they caught the attention of Ernest Jones, president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, who invited her to lecture in London in 1925. The following year she settled there for good, and in 1927 she was elected a member of the British society. Her book The Psycho-Analysis of Children, built on her London lectures, appeared in 1932. From around 1930 she also took on adult patients, and she gradually gathered a circle of colleagues and trainees who came to be known as the “Kleinians.” Her insistence that the roots of adult suffering lay in the very first months of life, far earlier than most analysts were prepared to look, gave the British society a distinctive character among the psychoanalytic communities of Europe.
Over the next three decades Klein built a theory that shifted psychoanalysis away from Freud’s focus on instinctual drives and toward relationships, the “objects” of love and hate that each person carries inside. In papers of 1935 and 1940 she described what she called the depressive position: the moment when an infant begins to grasp that the mother it loves and the mother it rages against are one and the same person, and feels guilt, sorrow and a longing to repair the harm done in fantasy. In 1946, in “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” she described an earlier, more primitive state, the paranoid-schizoid position, in which the world is split into wholly good and wholly bad, and introduced the concept of projective identification, the unconscious pushing of unwanted parts of oneself into another person.
Her final major work, Envy and Gratitude, published in 1957 when she was seventy-five, argued that envy, the wish to spoil what is good because one does not possess it, is among the most destructive of human emotions, and that the capacity for gratitude is its most important counterweight.
The Controversial Discussions
In 1938 Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna arrived in London as refugees from Nazi-annexed Vienna, along with a group of Viennese analysts. Anna Freud was the other great pioneer of child analysis, and her approach, cautious, educational and focused on strengthening the child’s ego, clashed sharply with Klein’s deep interpretations of infantile fantasy.
The tension broke into the open during the Second World War. Between 1942 and 1944, while bombs fell on London, the British Psycho-Analytical Society held a series of formal scientific meetings, the “Controversial Discussions” in which each side presented papers defending its views. Among Klein’s fiercest critics was her own daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, by then an analyst herself. The society did not split; instead it reached a compromise that created separate training streams for the Kleinians, the followers of Anna Freud, and an independent middle group, an arrangement that shaped British psychoanalysis for generations.
A Jewish émigré’s private sorrows
Klein was a secular Jew who left behind the religious observance of her father’s youth, but her life traced the path of many Central European Jewish intellectuals of her generation: from imperial Vienna to Budapest, out of Hungary’s post-war turmoil, and on to Berlin and finally Britain. She left Germany seven years before Hitler came to power, and so was spared the flight that later drove most of her Berlin and Viennese colleagues, many of them Jewish, into exile in London and New York.
Her private life was marked by grief. In 1934 her son Hans died in a mountaineering fall at the age of twenty-seven. Melitta insisted it had been suicide and blamed her mother. Klein turned her grief into work: her papers on the depressive position and on mourning were written in the years that followed. Mother and daughter were never reconciled. Colleagues described Klein as forceful, charismatic and domineering, inspiring fierce loyalty in her followers and equally fierce resistance in her opponents.
Last years
Klein continued to see patients, train analysts and write well into her seventies. One of her last projects was a session-by-session account of her wartime treatment of a ten-year-old boy she called Richard, published after her death as Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961).
In 1960 she was diagnosed with cancer and underwent surgery. She died in London on September 22, 1960, aged seventy-eight. Her papers are held today at the Wellcome Collection in London.
Legacy
Klein is regarded as the principal founder of object relations theory, one of the most influential schools of modern psychoanalysis. Her followers and students, among them Hanna Segal, Wilfred Bion and Herbert Rosenfeld, extended her ideas to the treatment of psychosis and severe personality disorders, and concepts she introduced, such as splitting and projective identification, became part of the everyday vocabulary of psychotherapists far beyond her own school.
Her play technique laid the groundwork for modern play therapy, now used with children in clinics, schools and hospitals around the world. Her idea that an infant’s relationship with its mother shapes its inner world fed into later work on attachment and early development, and thinkers in fields from literary criticism to feminism have drawn on her picture of a mind torn between love and destruction. Her life itself became the subject of Nicholas Wright’s 1988 play Mrs. Klein. Controversial in her lifetime and still debated today, she changed how we think about childhood, insisting that even the youngest children have rich and turbulent inner lives worth taking seriously.
Sources & further reading
Melanie Klein, Wikipedia · Klein, Melanie, Encyclopedia.com · Melanie Klein, Psychology’s Feminist Voices · Melanie Reizes Klein, Jewish Virtual Library · Paul Seabright, “Shall we tell the children?” (review of Grosskurth), London Review of Books · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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