Melanie Klein: biography and thought of this psychoanalyst

Melanie Klein is one of the main representatives of psychoanalysis. Although she was an admirer of Sigmund Freudof her, her way of conceiving her psychoanalytic therapy made her raise her own current within this great discipline: Kleinism.

With an extremely difficult life personally, Melanie Klein knew how to face adversity and become one of the most prominent figures in child psychological therapy. Today we are going to discover what her story was, through a biography of Melanie Klein.

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Brief biography of Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein was a British-Austrian psychoanalyst who she developed her own theory of psychoanalysis, based on the ideas of Sigmund Freud but introducing some concepts of her own authorship. She was a pioneer in the creation of psychological therapies for children.

She formed her own theoretical school on child psychoanalysis and became the first continental European psychoanalyst to join the British Psychoanalytical Society. She was the main opponent of Anna Freud.

Childhood

Born as Melanie Reizes, Melanie Klein was born on March 30, 1882 in Vienna, at that time the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, Moriz Reizes, came from an Orthodox Jewish family and studied to be a doctor against the religious beliefs of his relatives. Moriz married Libussa Deutsch, an attractive and intelligent woman from Slovakia twenty years his junior. Four children were born from the marriage: Emilie, Emmanuel, Sidonie and Melanie. Melanie was raised without religious impositions.

According to her biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein recognized that she came into the world unexpectedly, but she did not feel that she received less love from her parents. What did mark her childhood was the death of her sister Sidonie when Melanie was just four years old. Sidonie died at the age of eight from scrofula, a type of tuberculosis. As a child, Melanie always felt very close to her sister, whom she remembered with great admiration for teaching her reading and arithmetic.

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Adolescence

In 1898, at the age of 16, Melanie Reizes passed the exams for access to medicine, the discipline she had always wanted to study. However, her plans would be truncated with the arrival of love, since the following year she met who would be her future husband Arthur Stevan Klein, a second cousin on her mother's side who was studying chemical engineering in Zurich.

In 1900, her father, Moriz Reizes, died at the age of 72. At that very moment, her sister Emilie marries Dr. Leo Pick. The death of her father along with the marriage of her sister triggers a crisis for Melanie and the rest of the family.. To all this would be added a tragic event two years later when her brother Emmanuel de ella died of a heart attack in Genoa, at just 25 years old. This death marked Melanie for her whole life because she was very close to Emmanuel.

It had been her brother Emmanuel de ella who had encouraged her to study medicine. In fact, it was he who helped Melanie enter the Gymnasium in Vienna. All this meant that, when her brother died, Melanie he felt deeply guilty about what happened. Not because he believed that he could have prevented his death by studying medicine or anything like that, but because he knew that her impending marriage to Arthur Klein was something that she was taking a toll on her brother's physical and mental health higher.

According to his biographer, Emmanuel was self-destructing with Melanie's budding marriage to Arthur. Added to this, Emmanuel suffered from intense fevers when he was only twelve years old, probably caused by previous tuberculosis.

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Hard marriage and family life

Barely 21 years old, Melanie married Arthur Klein in 1903., taking her surname from him. The union was not satisfactory for Melanie and she always remembered it as an unhappy marriage. Despite this, the Klein family had three children: Melitta, Hans and Erich.

Marriage was just the straw that broke the camel's back in a life marked by deaths of loved ones, numerous depressive episodes, an unsatisfactory love life and an anti-Semitic wave in central Europe that was increasingly evident.

Melanie Klein she underwent psychoanalytic treatments on several occasions. But, in an act of wanting to overcome adversity and learn from what was happening to him, it was precisely his health problems that made her know his vocation. She began to feel very interested in psychoanalysis, having the opportunity to be treated by great figures of her time such as Sándor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham.

In 1914, just as she begins to be interested in psychoanalysis, her husband goes to war and her mother Libussa dies of cancer. A short time later and after several attempts at reconciliation, Melanie and Arthur Klein separated. Melanie is not known to have another stable partner, except for a lover, Cheskel Zwi Klötzel, a journalist and book author. German children, also a married man, who would end up fleeing to Palestine due to the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe.

But the biggest blow in her personal life would come from her own eldest daughter, Melitta Schmideberg. Although she initially agreed with the principles of child psychoanalysis that her mother had established, soon she became an ally of Edward Glover, one of her ideological adversaries. Melitta and Glover engaged in boycotting Melanie Klein's theories at meetings of the British Psychoanalytical Society. The fight was so strong that mother and daughter never reconciled.

Death

Melanie Klein was diagnosed with anemia in 1960 and, just a few months later, with colon cancer. She underwent an operation that, although at first it seemed to be successful, in the end a series of complications ended up developing that would be the ones that would end her life. Melanie Klein died on September 22, 1960, at the age of 78.

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Professional career and development of his theory

Here we expose some of the most important moments in Melanie Klein's professional career and how she developed her particular psychoanalytic theory.

Beginnings in psychoanalysis

With the outbreak of the First World War, her husband Arthur Klein is called into the ranks. As a result of stress, anxiety and everything that was happening in her life, it is in this year that she Melanie Klein she undergoes psychoanalysis with Sándor Ferenczi, a close friend of Freud.

In 1918, Melanie Klein listens to Sigmund Freud read her paper "Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy" at the V Congress of Psychoanalysis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. A year later, Melanie she presents a study done with her own five-year-old son, Erich, to the Hungarian Society of Psychoanalysis. The society rewards her with her membership.

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First analyzes in children

In 1921 Melanie Klein, Seeing how anti-Semitism is spreading in Hungary, she moves to Berlin. At this point in her life her real career as a child psychoanalyst begins, treating she children, attending international congresses and becomes a member of the Society of Psychoanalysis of Berlin.

Thanks to her friendship with the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein was able to advance professionally abroad. Jones did her a big favor when she published an article by Melanie Klein entitled "The Development of a Child" in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. With this publication Klein gains quite a bit of popularity, making figures such as Karl Abraham and Sigmund Freud talk about her.

Achieving international fame

In the year 1926 she moved to London where she began treating children, including the children of the Jones family and her own young son Erich. In 1927, her main detractor, Anna Freud writes to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society about Klein's techniques for child analysis. In response, Ernest Jones organizes a symposium at the British Society on the same subject, something that Sigmund Freud himself comes to take as a personal attack on him and his daughter.

On October 2, 1927, Melanie Klein was elected a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society.. Several years later, in 1932 she publishes her major theoretical work “The Psychoanalysis of Children”, published in English and German simultaneously. During this time, Klein attends several conferences where she presents the development of her theory.

Klein vs. Freud

When World War II broke out in 1939, Sigmund and Anna Freud moved to London.

On February 25, 1942, the first extraordinary meeting of the British Society of Psychoanalysis takes place. The enmity between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud has reached such proportions that, now, Two camps have been created among British psychoanalysts: Kleinians and Freudians. During these years, the Freudian sector headed by Anna Freud, together with Melanie's own daughter, Melitta, is dedicated to attacking Klein's theories.

The differences between the two theories were not resolved until 1946. It is then that a conciliation group or center (Middle Group) arises within the British Society of Psychoanalysis. This group aims to calm the atmosphere and harmonize the differences between Anna Freud's theory and Melanie Klein's. In 1947, John Rickman, who was a member of this conciliation group, is elected as president of the Society.

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Melanie Klein's psychoanalysis

Among the contributions of Melanie Klein to the theory of psychoanalysis we find the following.

Oedipus complex and superego

Melanie Klein shares with Sigmund Freud the idea of ​​the Oedipus complex, a concept that defends that the boy or girl wants to take the place of the parent of the same sex and intends to establish a sex-affective relationship with the other parent of her.

In Freud's model it is explained that this phase occurs between the ages of three and five. Instead, Melanie Klien proposes an earlier Oedipus complex, with a first stage in which the child fantasizes about a body in which the sexual attributes of the father and mother are united.

During this stage, the little one shows cruel characteristics related to body orifices, such as the mouth or the anus and this would be a consequence, under the perspective of the psychoanalytic model, a consequence of the projections of its own sexuality. Melanie Klein argued that the frustration produced in children by weaning and the incorporation of food into their diet played a very important role.

As for the superego or superego, Freudian theory explains it as that part of our being that represents the ethical thoughts acquired by the culture once the Oedipus complex has been overcome. Melanie Klein makes some changes to this concept, since she believes that the superego is present in children since they are born and are infants. Added to this, she states that the superego has to do with a feeling of guilt that occurs during the Oedipus complex.

Depressive position and paranoid-schizoid position

According to Melanie Klein, the depressive position is a recurring thought in the child's mind. It manifests itself for the first time in the first year and a half of life and would have to do with the anxiety that occurs in the infant for fear of losing the loved being-object, which is usually the mother.

As for the paranoid-schizoid position, this would be a stage prior to the depressive one. It occurs during the first months of life, although it can reappear in subsequent episodes of the child's development. The child conceives of the mother as a part centered on her breast, which she perceives as a "good breast" when she feeds him and a "bad breast" when she does not. In this phase, the infant's concern has its origin in his desire to survive, more than the fear of losing the mother typical of the depressive position.

Works by Melanie Klein

Among the main works of Melanie Klein we highlight:

• Love, Guilt and Reparation and other works 1921-1945 (“Love, guilt and reparation and other works 1921-1945”).
• The Psychoanalysis of children.
• Envy and Gratitude and other works 1946-1963 (“Envy and Gratitude and other works 1946-1963”).
• Narrative of a Child Analysis.