Melanie Klein

The Basics

Robert D. Hinshelwood, Tomasz Fortuna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317212997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Melanie Klein: The Basics provides an accessible and concise introduction to the life and work of Melanie Klein, whose discoveries advanced those of Freud and other analysts, deepening our insight into the unconscious domain of psychology in human beings. Klein began her work by developing a method of psychoanalysis for children, who suffer from anxiety and other, often unrecognised, conflicts, which enabled understanding of those crucial early steps in the development of human mind and identity. Although she initiated one strand of clinical and theoretical developments, many of her discoveries are well-regarded by other schools of psychoanalysis.

The book contains four parts, as well as further reading suggestions and a helpful glossary of key terms. PartI introduces Melanie Klein in the context of her life, her early interest in psychoanalysis and her first discoveries; PartII takes up the development of her technique of child analysis and discusses the ways in which her insights and conclusions in this area influenced the technique of adult analysis andthemore general understanding of the human mind; PartIII focuses on further scientific and clinical developments in psychoanalytic technique – especially those referring to the understanding and treatment of serious emotional disturbance, e.g. psychosis or affective disorders; PartIV focuses on contemporary developments in Kleinian and post-Kleinian psychoanalysis, considering clinical, cultural, and socio-political applications. Each chapter poses a basic question at the outset, provides an account of how Klein faced this question and worked with it to develop her ideas, and ends by posing a follow up question to be addressed in the subsequent chapter.

This book will greatly appeal to readers from any field seeking a clear and concise introduction to Melanie Klein. It will also interest researchers and professionals working within the field of psychoanalysis seeking a succinct overview of Melanie Klein's contribution.

PART I

New method, new facts

Children have fun, play, and they also struggle with life. So, it is not all fun and it is not easy to be a child. It is not easy to grow out of being a child either. But precisely why it is a struggle, and why our fun is interfered with, has deep roots, which we are not often aware of. Children have an inner life – their psychic reality. And they play it out for us, literally. They play their pleasure and their pain. As Melanie Klein wrote,

One of the many interesting and surprising experiences of the beginner in child analysis is to find in even very young children, a capacity for insight which is often far greater than that of adults.

(Klein, 1955, pp. 131–132)

She began her work with the idea that you might learn more from children about the early development of our minds than from adults.

Here is an example of this kind of work described by one of Klein’s followers, Betty Joseph. She presents the case of a three-year-old boy, whom she called G for confidentiality reasons, who came to her with severe anxiety and was described as ‘very controlling and uncontrollable’. What follows is a brief description of a session Betty Joseph had with G. On the previous day G had been unsettled, yelling and kicking, and tried to leave the playroom. Note how Joseph observes and interprets his play and behaviour:

The following day he came to the playroom willingly with a roll of Smarties and some bubblegum. He ate the Smarties and chewed a piece of gum. I explained that he had felt very angry with me yesterday, but today felt different and he brought some sweetness with him. He removed the gum from his mouth and gently put it in my hand. He got up and went to one of the small chairs that stand by the low playroom table and rocked it. As the seat was under the table, naturally, it did not fall; he rocked at it again and it remained steady, he repeated this with the other chairs. I interpreted that he was relieved that I did not give in to him yesterday but remained firm and steady like the chairs and did not let him overwhelm me. G then went on to other activities and when the session ended he left in a friendly way saying goodbye.

I think that here G demonstrates something of his internal world and his own anxieties – his determination to force his object to give in, his violence when he does not get his way and how the violence increases his anxiety so that both analyst and playroom become persecuting, and then he needs to get away, escape (Joseph, 2001, pp. 190–191).

Melanie Klein was one of the very earliest psychoanalysts to develop a method of analysing children, getting them to play with toys rather than to rely solely on speaking about the ideas in their heads. Almost contemporaneous with Klein’s development of her method, Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s daughter) developed a somewhat different method, and a rivalry ensued, more or less to the present.

1

Who was she?

The routes that lead psychoanalysts to their profession are very varied, but often include some difficulties of their own which have led them to speculate introspectively.

What were the conditions as far as we can tell which gave Melanie Klein pause to reconsider the course of her own life?

KEYWORDS

Melanie Klein’s biography

Introspection

Psychoanalysis in Vienna and Budapest

Melanie Reizes was born in 1882 to a Jewish family in Vienna, and like everyone struggled with her own conflicts and disappointments. At school she had been a bright pupil, and to realise her dream of being a doctor she moved to a gymnasium – a high school with standards that would enable her to go to university. To make this move she was coached by her older brother, Emmanuel, in Greek and Latin to pass the necessary exams. She was ambitious from a young age and was obviously very focused. She decided in her teens that she wanted to become a doctor, and this was quite remarkable as few women trained as doctors in those days.

In fact, she never made it to medical school. Her father was a rather unsuccessful dentist, who originally trained as a doctor, and so, when she was 19, the family married Melanie off to a chemical engineer, her brother’s friend Arthur Klein, who had fallen in love with her when she was only 17 years old. At this point, Melanie Klein faced a life devoted to marriage and family. Feeling at that age that she had to give up her plans to be a doctor must have been a considerable disappointment for a talented and spirited teenager.

There was, however, a very open minded atmosphere and a sense of equality in her family, as her father defied his parents’ wishes and studied medicine instead of becoming a Rabbi, and her mother was a very strong woman who at some point had become the breadwinner for the family. Perhaps this also had an impact on young Melanie, her curiosity, and her academic and clinical ambitions.

Around this time too, 1900, her brother gave up his own place at medical school having been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and he went to travel around the Mediterranean for health reasons, and wrote poetry. He died during this sad adventure, in Genoa in 1901. Melanie had been very close to her brother, and thought the world of him. He was the one who praised the first poem Melanie wrote when she was nine. His loss was considerable to her and the family. Previously, when she had been only four years of age, her older sister Sidonie had died, from tuberculosis as well.

Her husband gained work in Budapest, and the young family moved away from Vienna. She had two children, in 1904 and 1907 (called Melitta and Hans), and a third in 1914 (Erich). Late in her life she looked back and described how, even before her marriage, she was doubtful, and thought that marrying her husband would be a mistake for her. She and her husband parted in 1920. Clearly Melanie Klein was dissatisfied with her fate. It is not surprising, therefore, that she suffered from depression after the birth of each of her children – a puerperal depression, as it is called, which is by no means uncommon. It tends to be connected with the way the hormone balance varies due to the pregnancy, birth, and breast-feeding. But it looks too as if it must be to do with circumstances as well, in that we react as much to life events as to our bodily functions. In Melanie Klein’s case, circumstances had involved her moving away from Vienna and her family to other parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, due to her husband’s work commitments.

Because of her unhappinesses, 1914 was a crucial year; her third child was born and her mother died in the same year (not to mention the start of the devastating war). She (and perhaps her husband too) began to think of some kind of psychological help for her. This kind of help which is now readily available to us was rare in those days.

SUMMARY: Melanie Klein was not satisfied with a domestic life, and her ambition to become a doctor was thwarted by an early marriage. Her career started with her own unhappiness, and at the very beginning of the period when women were demanding and beginning to be granted the professional opportunities that men had previously enjoyed. Her childhood dream of being a doctor was re-awakened by discovering the possibilities of psychoanalysis.

Melanie Klein was ambitious to find her own path and make her own contribution. What would that be?

2

Where did she start?

Melanie Klein discovered psychoanalysis just at a time when new thinking and new discoveries were prevalent. How might it have been possible in the middle of Central Europe, for an ordinary wife of an engineer, and the mother by then of three children, to explore her own psychic reality?

What opportunities were there at the beginning of the twentieth century for her to make a professional contribution in her life?

KEYWORDS

Becoming a psychoanalyst

Personal analysis

Child observation

Inhibition of curiosity

Beginnings of child analysis

Despite bouts of depression on several occasions, her enquiring mind led Klein to books, and she found, perhaps in a bookshop, a small book by Sigmund Freud, called On Dreams, published in 1901. That book summarised his earlier work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud’s meticulous discovery on how to find the meaning of our dreams (Freud, 1900). By 1914–1915, she was in her early 30s and living in Budapest in Hungary (Grosskurth, 1986). Despite growing up in Vienna, she had not encountered Freud’s ideas; however, when she found this little book it was a great revelation, and she wrote:

I remember that the first book of Freud’s that I read was the small book On Dreams (not ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’) and, when I read it, I knew that that was it – that was what I was aiming at, at least during those years when I was so very keen to find what would satisfy me intellectually and emotionally.

(unpublished manuscript in Wellcome Library Archives¹)

It began a new urge in her, first of all to get some treatment for herself, but also to re-open the ambition that she had once had to train as a doctor. The first step was to consider visiting a psychoanalyst due to her symptoms of depression.

By chance, but helped no doubt by her resourcefulness, she managed to find in Budapest one of Freud’s foremost followers, Sandor Ferenczi. It seems that there was a colleague working in her husband’s office also called Ferenczi, and a cousin of Sandor, and so it is possible that this is the connection that was made between Melanie Klein and psychoanalysis. During the war years, she underwent analysis, though it was interrupted at times by Ferenczi being called away as a doctor on military service.

Now two major factors came into play in her life. The first was that Ferenczi noticed and encouraged Melanie Klein’s talents, resourcefulness, and curiosity; and the second was that there were major developments within psychoanalytic theory about the roots of depression.

The first factor, Ferenczi’s belief in her abilities, led him to encourage Klein to take an interest in children’s development. Towards the end of the war, in 1918, her own children were aged 14, 11, and 4 years. She was not just a mother, but a mother with a serious curiosity about their development. The second factor was the result of Freud’s own publications. In fact, Klein would become particularly interested in a crucial psychoanalytic case history that had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I New method, new facts
• PART II The earliest development – Starting at birth
• PART III How crazy can you get?
• PART IV Beyond basics – Truth
• Glossary
• Note
• References
• Index