CHAPTER ONE
Early background
This chapter aims to give the reader a brief review of relevant biographical data on Melanie Kleinâs upbringing, cultural background, education, and life prior to her career in psychoanalysis. It also outlines what might be called the pre-history of child analysis and the reasons behind its slow development.
The sources for Kleinâs early childhood and adolescence consist of some surviving family letters, oral tradition (later colleaguesâ anecdotes and reported conversations), and some 48 pages of autobiographical notes (PP/KLE/A.50) dictated by Klein, at the age of 77, in November 1959. This chapter uses the latter but first discusses their character and en passant some debateable use of them by Grosskurth, Kleinâs only biographer to date (Grosskurth, 1986).
In the catalogue of Kleinâs archives, cogently, this item is annotated âdictated incomplete autobiographyâ, possibly suggesting a title added after Kleinâs death and recognizing the incomplete character of the surviving document, which comprises 48 pages of the old 10 Ă 8 inch typing paper. It is in no way a finished work but selected reminiscences of themes from Kleinâs life: family and cultural background, sibling group, education, career in psychoanalysis, marriage, children, divorce, and her professional life and work resettled in England. It is repetitive and rather rambling (possibly the effect of dictation, as well as being âunfinishedâ). The manuscript comprises clearly selective (and mainly positive) notes on her life, as tends to be characteristic of an autobiographical genre. Associated papers reveal that part of the impetus for recording such matters was from American academicsâ requests for information about Kleinâs life and career while she was still alive (see OâShaughnessy, 1987, and below). Grosskurthâs practice of constantly referring to this manuscript as Kleinâs Autobiography is rather misleading, implying a finished product and one intended as a sort of official autobiography. Moreover, Grosskurthâs tendency to psychoanalyse her subject, without reliable evidential support, has been open to criticism (see Ingleby, 1987; OâShaughnessy, 1987; Segal, 1986, p. 50).
Grosskurth (1986, p. 11) is also misleading in her suggestion that for her âautobiographyâ Klein had a model in Freudâs âAutobiographical Studyâ (Freud, 1925d [1924]), a paper written for a series on Die Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstanderstellung (translatable as Contemporary Medicine in Self-Portraits), designed for authors to give an account of their role in the making of contemporary medicine. Freudâs work is not an autobiography but a quite detailed account, primarilyâas the series requiredâof his individual role in the origin and development of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory, listing many key publications. Klein does not do the equivalent, nor does she go into any detail about her theoretical contributions. Rather, she seems to focus on some important influences both in her personal and her professional life and on her achievements. The work is used in this chapter as a reflection of Kleinâs own thoughts in old age about some key aspects and pivotal points in her lifeâinevitably selective, cautious, at times self-critical, politically careful, and, unlike Freud in his âAutobiographical Studyâ (e.g. Freud, 1925d [1924], p. 9), restrained about any anti-Semitism.
Family matters
Dr Moriz Reizes, Kleinâs father, originated from Lemberg (now Lvov), Galicia (then part of the AustroâHungarian empire, now in the Ukraine). Destined by his parents for a rabbinical career, he rebelled and, instead, studied medicine and qualified as a doctor. He also abandoned the orthodox marriage his parents had arranged for him âto a girl he had never seenâ, which was short-lived and dissolved. Born in 1828, he was very much older than Kleinâs mother, Libusa Deutsch (born 1852), who was from Warbok (Verbotz) in Slovakia. Kleinâs father married Libusa in 1875, when she was 25 âand an extremely beautiful girlâ. The couple then moved to Vienna, Kleinâs birthplace, from Reizesâ home in Deutsch-Kreutz, a small town then within Hungary and about 70 miles from Vienna (Grosskurth, 1986, p. 6); there he set up a not very successful practice, the income from which his wife supplemented by unconventionally and adventurously opening a plant shop also selling âreptilesâ (PP/KLE/A.50, p. 2). Money remained a problem. Her father, as Klein regretted, was elderly when she was born and evidently seemed to find it hard to be playful with her, openly favouring his firstborn child, Emilie, whom he designated his favourite, to Kleinâs dismay:
My relation to my father was more complex, partly because he took, so I felt, relatively little interest in me and so often professed that my elder sister was his favourite. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 16]
The relation with my mother was, for some reason, much more vivid than the one with my father. I was the youngest and he was already in his fifties when I was born. He was an old fifty. I have no memories of his ever playing with me and he made it clear that he preferred my elder sister, the firstborn child. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 26]
These references to her fatherâs favouritism (for a third, see PP/KLE/A.50, p. 8) may emphasize Kleinâs hurt rather than lack of editing and may also have contributed to her later awareness in clinical work of the difficulties of favouritism for siblings (see Sherwin-White, 2014, p. 45).
Kleinâs mother came from a liberal and cultured Rabbinical family:
I have always been proud of the way in which she acquired her education. Her father was a rabbi in Deutsch-Kreutz. His grandfather was a very outstanding man. He was known all over the district for his knowledge and tolerance, being liberally-minded, quite different from the orthodoxy that characterised my fatherâs family. He had all the German philosophers on his shelves, unlike the attitude of the bigoted rabbis. There were three daughters, two of whom were beautiful, and they acquired their education by teaching themselves, by reading and I think probably also by discussions with their father. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 3]
This was a model for Kleinâs own autodidactism, love of knowledge, and liberalism and a source of her strong dislike of Jewish orthodoxy (PP/KLE/A.50, pp. 4â5). As she notes, âmy father came from a very orthodox Polish [Jewish] familyâ (p. 1); her parents were deeply attached âto the Jewish raceâ, and Klein notes her endorsement of their attitude, her own detachment from Zionism, and her lack of religious beliefs (pp. 6â7). She also underlines her sympathy with persecuted minorities and states that this may have helped her in her own struggles later as a minority with regard to her own psychoanalytic career and the opposition that it aroused.
Klein understandably missed the special role that a grandmother can play:
As far as my motherâs mother is concerned, I only know her photograph, which shows a lovely, friendly old lady, and I know that I longed for her to be living, because I never had a grandmother, and I knew that this was a nice, kind and pleasant woman. The whole impression I got, in contrast to my fatherâs family, was one of good family life, very simple in restricted circumstances, but full of interest in knowledge and education. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 4]
Later in life, she offered such a role affectionately to her own grandchildren (see Sherwin-White, 2017).
Klein, however, appreciated her fatherâs later support for her wish for an education at gymnasium and a career in medicine (p. 13; see below). He was a self-made man whose pursuit of education and culture Klein admired, as she did her motherâs; both presented an example that she was to follow.
Kleinâs own sibling group
Klein moved on to describe her sibling group; she was the youngest of a group of four siblings: her eldest sister Emilie (b. 1876), brother Emanuel (b. 1977), and her middle sister Sidonie (b. 1878). As a very young child, she suffered the death (from a form of tuberculosis) of Sidonieâa sister whose support she chose to memorialize in her autobiographical notes:
I was wildly keen on knowledge, deeply ambitious and very hurt by their [her elder siblingsâ] being so superior to me. Sidonie, lying in bed, took pity on me, and she taught me the principles of counting and reading, which I picked up very quickly. It is quite possible that I idealise her a little, but my feeling is that, had she lived, we would have been the greatest friends and I still have a feeling of gratitude to her for satisfying my mental needs, all the greater because I think she was very ill at the time. She died when I was about 4Âœ and I have the feeling that I never got over the feelings of grief for her death. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 10]
Klein was also to lose her deeply loved brother, Emanuel, in 1902 (OâShaughnessy, 1987, p. 133). It remains uncertain how much her personal experience of bereavement, of the conscious and unconscious reactions to the deaths of her two siblings, contributed to her later understanding of the process of mourning, including a surviving childâs feelings of triumph and painful guilt that were to be so well articulated in her future clinical papers. Grosskurth (1986, pp. 250ff), having noted the death in 1939 of Arthur, Kleinâs divorced husband, then goes on to postulate that the case of Kleinâs patient, Mrs A (Klein, 1940, pp. 355â361), is actually Kleinâs disguised account of her own process of mourning the death of her son, Hans. Frank (2009, p. 17n.1) and John Steiner (1993, pp. 35â36, p. 35n.1) accept this, the latter writing that âKlein wrote this paper shortly after she lost her own son in a mountaineering accident, and it is clear that Mrs A of the paper was actually herselfâ (p. 36 n.1). However, the chronology alone does not work, since Kleinâs son Hansâby then an adultâdied in 1934, and it is evident that Grosskurth has elided the two deaths. Nevertheless, the account of the early stages of Mrs Aâs mourning (she lost her son when he was a schoolboy) indicates how the death also stirred unconscious feelings of triumph she had felt, besides sorrow, when Mrs Aâs own brother died (p. 357). In Kleinâs case, her brother and sisters were an essential part of her early life and experience from infancy onwards (see Sherwin-White, 2014, p. 32).
Emanuel, like Sidonie, suffered from an incurable illness (a rheumatic heart condition), which, his family knew, would eventually kill him too at a young age. Fear of survival and the familiar difficulties suffered by the healthy siblings of sick ones were challenges for Klein too, and she recognized that as a result of Sidonieâs early death, âI felt that my mother needed me all the more now that Sidonie had gone, and it is probable that some of the spoiling was due to my having to replace that childâ (PP/KLE/A.50, pp. 10â11). For Melanie, as the youngest child, the death of Sidonie seems thus to have thrown a shadow over her early childhood, with personal and familial concern whether she would safely reach Sidonieâs age and survive (for clinical exploration of the theme of the replacement child, see M. Reid, 2014, pp. 269â272). Emanuelâs illness and the uncertainty of his survival added further anxiety. Notable, too, is Kleinâs choice to comment on her regret, in the cases of Sidonie and Emanuel (PP/KLE/A.50, pp. 11â12, 14), that medicine had not advanced sufficiently to find cures for their various conditions. It is speculative, but not implausible, that this repeated experience fostered Kleinâs determination in her own field to pioneer analysis hitherto unavailable for young children with emotional illnesses, and to extend treatment for adult patients too (PP/KLE/A.50, p. 28).
Formal education
Klein enjoyed starting at her local school, a lyceum, âand was very happy thereâ (p. 24): âI was very ambitious. From the moment that I entered school it was very important to me to get the best possible marks, and that attitude, I remember, I had until I went to gymnasiumâ (PP/KLE/A.50, p. 36).
While at the lyceum, at âabout 14â (PP/KLE/A.50, p. 22), Klein decided that she wanted to go to university and so needed to leave the lyceum and secure admission to the gymnasium, which she did apparently with the help of intensive coaching (including Greek and Latin) from her brother (PP/KLE/A.50). Klein had decided that she wanted to study medicine, like her father and her brother. Emanuel, however, was to interrupt his medical studies to pursue his literary and artistic pursuits and to travel, because, Klein believed, of his knowledge that he would die youngâas he in fact did (p. 14).
Kleinâs radical ambitiousness as a woman needs emphasis: what has up to now been ignored is that Vienna University admitted women as full students only from 1897, when Klein was 15, and then only for philosophy. Women were admitted to medical school from 1900, just in time for Kleinâin theoryâto benefit from this historic advance in womenâs education in Austria. Both her parents were supportive of the plan, in keeping with their own educationally liberal outlook and belief in the importance of education. Klein alludes to the historic character of her plan for a university education in the notes she wrote in October 1959 for a Chicago doctor on some biographical details. With a different emphasis from the autobiographical notes, Klein wrote (in a two-page manuscript in the same archival bundle): âBetween the ages of thirteen and fourteen, I decided to study for the University, which at that time was still regarded as a very advanced step; I attended the only school there which prepared girls for the Universityâ (PP/KLE/A.50).
It is possible that some polemic lies behind Kleinâs emphasis on her academic aspirations and study at the level of gymnasium, since in later psychoanalytic conflicts her opponents are said to have talked of her as âan uneducated womanâ in an anachronistic and rather sexist slur (see Grosskurth, 1986, p. 14).
By contrast with Kleinâs family, Freud and his wife had been conservative in the education of their daughters, all of whom were sent only to a lyceum and none to a gymnasium to prepare for entry to university (see Young-Bruehl, 1988, p. 52). As things turned out, due to a combination of financial pressures and Kleinâs engagement and later marriage, she had reluctantly to abandon her ambition to study medicine, although for two years she still studied extra-mural classes in art and history:
I could not continue my studies, because there was not enough time to take a course in medicine, but I went to extra-mural classes in art and history [at Vienna University], feeling all the time that I was missing something terribly, my intended study of medicine and psychiatry. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 24]
Though unable to qualify in medicine herself, Klein and her husband did enable their daughter, Melitta, in due course to get through gymnasium and to study medicine and psychiatry in Berlin, fulfilling an ambition that Klein herself had had to forgo.
Marriage, endings, and beginnings
Klein became engaged to engineer Arthur Klein, her second cousin and a close friend of her brother, at the age of 17; she married him in 1903, the day after her 21st birthday. In this she considered herself immature in retrospect; but she accepted his proposal, albeit at a time of family financial difficulties, and fell in love with him too (p. 23). The marriage was said to be problematic from the start (Segal, 1979, p. 31). Unhappily, it had been preceded by two deaths: that of her father in 1900 and of Emanuel in 1902. Kleinâs daughter was born 10 months after the marriage, in January 1904, and Hans three years later, in March 1907:
My first child, Melitta, was born on the 19th January, 1904, and I was very happy with her. I gave her much of my time and attention and she was very attached to me as well as to her nannie, who was a good Slovakian peasant woman. At that time I learnt Slovakian, and spoke it fluently. Melitta was a beautiful easy baby and soon showed herself to be very intelligent. My second child, Hans, was born on the 2nd March 1907, and developed very well. I also fed him, and we found that he was an extremely precocious child. At eighteen months he spoke fluently German, which I had started to speak with him, and Slovakian in such a way that he could turn from speaking with me in German to carrying on the conversation with her [the nanny] in Slovakian. [PP/KLE/A.50, p. 40]
Clearly, Klein breastfed both Melitta and Hans (pace Grosskurth, 1986, p. 42).
Family correspondence confirms Kleinâs unhappiness, revealing that she suffered from serious bouts of depression, especially during her pregnancy with Hans and its aftermath (Grosskurth, 1986, pp. 48ff). Kleinâs husband, Arthur, who was at the start of a successful career, had to travel, and the couple moved from his family home in Rosenberg (now Ruzomberok), then in Hungary, where Klein enjoyed a warm and sustaining relationship with her parents-in-law and Arthurâs siblings, especially his sister Jolan, which was to last.
For the next few years, to 1909, they moved to different positions within the Austro-Hungarian empire, to small and, for Klein, uncongenial provincial towns: Krappitz in Slovakia, now Krapkowice (Poland) and, finally, Hermanetz. Probably because of his awareness of his wifeâs extreme unhappiness in these small, culturally confined towns, Arthur did get a transfer to Budapest in about 1909, and the family settled there in 1910 (PP/KLE/A.50, p...