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Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein, (1882 - 1960), Austrian psychotherapist, built on the
work of Sigmund Freud, particularly in the area of child psychology. Also
one of the theoretical cofounders of object relations theory.
Invited by Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein came to London in 1926, where
she worked until her death in 1960.
Klein's theoretical work gradually centered on a highly speculative hypothesis
propounded by Sigmund Freud, which stated that life may be an anomaly,
i.e., 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 thereby postulated
to have a companion force, Thanatos, which seeks to terminate and disintegrate
life.
Examining ultra-aggressive fantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very
young, very ill children, Melanie Klein put forth the interpretation that
the human psyche is in a constant oscillation depending on whether Eros
or Thanatos is in the fore. She calls the state of the psyche, when the
sustaining principle of life is in domination, the depressive position.
The psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of
life she gives the name the paranoid-schizoid position.
Melanie Klein's insistence on regarding aggression as an important force
in its own right when analyzing children brought her into conflict with
Anna Freud, the other major child psychotherapist working in England at
the time. Many controversies arose from this conflict.
Literature
C. Fred Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account
of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory, Yale
UP 1990
P. Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work, Karnac Books 1987
- A thorough biography
Robert Hinshelwood, Susan Robinson, Oscar Zarate, Introducing Melanie
Klein, Icon Books UK 2003
Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921-1945,
Paperback, Free Press 2002
Jacqueline Rose, Why War?-- Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to
Melanie Klein, Blackwell Publishers 1993
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