We are never alone. From our first connections with other human beings, we start filling ourselves with them, melding not only their actions and expressed expectations, but our imagined interpretations of their motivations, with our own natural mental machinery until finding the boundary between what is “legitimately” us and what is “imported” material formed of a mixture of outside reality and imagination is an all but impossible task. We are us but we are also, to some extent, a little bit everybody we’ve ever met, and once you realize that the question then becomes, how does that chaotic swirl of self and pieces of others possibly function in the real world?
In the realm of psychoanalysis, nobody pushed that question further, and into more uncomfortable places, than Melanie Klein (1882-1960). She is among the most controversial figures in the psychoanalytic pantheon, an individual who has been lauded as a thinker of an originality and depth that surpassed that even of Freud himself, and decried as a perverted hack who wrote her own damaged psychology onto a generation of hapless and innocent children. In the six decades that have passed since her death, the tempers and partisanship that her ideas inspired have just begun to settle, allowing us to finally approach the question, just what was Melanie Klein?
Klein’s most reductive chroniclers place a great amount of emphasis on the unique familial constellation of her youth and early adulthood, and not entirely without reason. Born in Vienna, she was the daughter of Moriz and Libussa Reizes. Moriz had broken from his more orthodox Jewish family to study medicine, but was a generally ineffectual figure who spent more time airily polishing his intellect than effectively providing for his perennially impoverished family. The real powerhouse of the household was Libussa, whose business sense compensated for Moriz’s ethereality, and whose resolute self-assuredness as to what is best in any situation dominated the lives of her four children, of whom Melanie was the youngest, and her personal favorite. After the passing of Moriz, the siblings devolved into a perpetual game of mutual misinformation and emotional manipulation to pry what they could from the extremely limited financial resources controlled by Libussa. Most manipulative of all was her brother, Emanuel, whose poor health led him to the belief that he would die young, and thence to the decision that he might as well spend his life living the Byronic ideal of drugs, travel, women, and maudlin self-pity at the family’s emotional and financial expense.
For a certain stripe of psychoanalytic historian, everything you need to know about Klein the thinker is contained in that paragraph - of course she would grow up to be a theorist of the primary importance of the mother, and the omnipresence of fantastic versions of other people in one’s mental life, growing up in the toxic web of control, guilt, and deceit that she did. This has then provided the space for those who are uncomfortable with her more controversial claims to disregard them as the products of an unbalanced mind with an unhealthy and unnatural perspective on how familial relations work.
Ideas, however, rarely have such neat origin stories, and we are going to have to do a bit better than, “Her childhood was complicated” if we are to get to the bottom of Klein’s unique ideas. Returning to our tale, then, Melanie Reizes was an unusually intelligent and strikingly beautiful individual who was being courted by multiple men simultaneously, but who settled on the seemingly unpromising figure of Arthur Klein. He was smart, with good career prospects as an industrial chemist, and perhaps the promise of financial stability after years of wandering in the economic wilderness thanks to the irresolute diffuseness of her father played a significant role in her fateful choice.
Arthur and Melanie were not temperamentally suited for each other, and the constant interference by Libussa, who continued to direct the course of Melanie’s life after her marriage, did not help the couple find a workable equilibrium. Arthur was emotionally distant, unfaithful, and was enraged by any deviations from acceptable behavior he detected in his children, going so far as to lie in hiding to catch his sons in the act of masturbation so that he could punish them for it. Melanie for her part coped with her deepening depression by being around as little as possible, taking regular extended excursions to the homes of friends and relatives to avoid the chilly domestic atmosphere.
After a series of dislocations motivated by Arthur’s employment, the family was able to settle for some time at Budapest in the 1910s, where Melanie sought therapy for her depression from Sandor Ferenczi, who was one of Sigmund Freud’s most important acolytes in the psychoanalytic cause. In 1914, Libussa died, and in her absence Melanie felt a swirling and contradictory mixture of relief, guilt, and the terrible burden of freedom. She worked through her grief in part by throwing herself into the theory of psychoanalysis, reading Freud’s On Dreams and finding there a ready and deeply compelling explanation for the multifarious and complicated forces that seemed to be ever pulling at her mind. With Ferenczi’s encouragement, she began the process of analyzing her own children along Freudian lines.
The problem, however, was that her son Erich was younger than Freudians generally believed was useful or even responsible to subject to psychoanalytic analysis. Lacking the more sophisticated psychological machinery that Freud had said developed after the age of six, Klein’s critics said, young children don’t have the capacity to understand what is being told to them about their impulses, or the ability to form the complicated links with their therapist (known as “transference” in the Freudian literature) that were crucial to a successful analysis. Klein proceeded anyway, and found what she thought were decidedly fruitful results. So, let’s talk about those….
Or rather, let’s get ready to talk about those, because Klein’s ideas about the mental world of children are of a sort that people tend to react to with instinctual disgust, or mockery, and while some of her conclusions are ones that you’ll probably end up rejecting, what I recommend is to go into them with as much of an open mind as possible for as long as possible, for decorating the path through her life’s work are these glimmering insights into the often tragic interconnectivity of humans that are well worth the having, and that you don’t get if you reject the entire Kleinian system out of hand upon contact with some of its more shocking elements. That said, let’s go.
For Klein, as her thinking would develop over the course of the two decades following her first exposure to psychoanalytic concepts, the critical moment of an individual’s life comes when he or she is weaned from her mother’s breast. Suddenly, the young brain has to scramble to make sense of a world where something purely good has been definitively taken away from it, and in the process of trying to piece together what existence is now about, the child takes into itself nebulous ideas about good and bad as represented in the person and body of the mother which go on to become long-term mental residents. The Mother as a good giver of comfort and life becomes supplanted by mother the denier, who either keeps all the good things in her body to herself, or, worse, seemingly shares them with the father (this was a time when children routinely slept in their parents’ rooms throughout early childhood and thus witnessed parental sex on the regular).
Internalizing this conception of Mother as a denying and hostile force, a child develops sadistic impulses, impulses directed against their mother, and subsequent anxieties as they attempt to reconcile their conceptions of mother as a good and giving force with those of her as a selfish and castrating one. These anxieties, Klein hypothesized, come out in children’s play, and it is the job of the therapist to notice them, and inform the children what tensions lie underneath their actions, as a way of helping them confront what underlies their anxieties and overcome them. This is where the discomfort really starts creeping in for most people experiencing Klein for the first time - the idea of taking a young child who has behavioral or emotional problems and telling them, for example, that the reason they cut the coal out of a toy train was that, subconsciously, they want to cut the feces out of their mother, or another who is sucking on the lamps of a toy carriage that it is because they want to suck on their father’s penis is, to put it lightly, the last straw for most.
I get that, but let’s put a pin in the carriage penises for now and look at another direction in which Klein took her thought in later years. Because at a young age we incorporate into ourselves both positive models of those around us, and threatening ones constructed from our anxieties and fears, we have at the same time conflicting notions of ourselves as good and whole individuals living in a loving world, and as individuals carrying in our deepest selves something rotten, something that threatens both the good in the world, and the good in ourselves. We live with the parts of people we have injected into ourselves, and with the fantasies of people that we have projected from ourselves out into the real world, and our poor egos have to navigate all of that as they attempt to find Reality in the mix of perceived hostilities and early wounds that color our approaches to it. For Klein, in a series of influential papers that peppered the 1920s and 1930s, the difficulties of recognizing the real and the fantasy in the plethora of individuals we have let into ourselves as both good and bad semi-permanent residents, and in the constructions of people we have constructed and layered over our perceptions of actual people in the world, drive a number of our psychological problems, from manic-depressive states to suicidal drives.
After the end of World War I, the anti-semitic regime that ultimately rose to power in Hungary compelled the flight of the Kleins to Berlin, where Klein’s increasing heterodoxy paved the way for a frosty reception among psychoanalytic circles there. Freud had held that the father was the driving force in creating early anxieties. Klein argued for the primacy of the mother. Freud had said that children probably couldn’t be profitably analyzed until about their sixth year. Klein included cases of children as young as two and a half in her works. In fact, at this period, Klein and Freud had much more in common than their divergences, but in these early days, any small deviation from orthodoxy was grounds for concern, and in spite of having psychoanalytic luminary Karl Alexander as her mentor in Berlin during this time, these were not good years for Klein. Her marriage disintegrated, her ideas were regularly challenged, and her financial situation declined in the absence of Arthur’s support.
Fortunately, what was heresy for Berlin was progress for London. Psychoanalysts there, led by Ernest Jones, found Klein’s ideas promising, and invited her to lecture on them in 1925, the success of which led Klein to move to England in 1926, there to remain for the rest of her career. The British Psycho-analytical Society chafed under the relative prestige of the Berlin and Vienna chapters, and considered the acquisition of Klein as a major Get. For at least the first half decade of her time in London, Klein’s ideas were actively supported by the majority of the Society, and Klein grew under these positive influences to develop some of the deep insights into childhood and the processes of introjection and projection that we noted above.
As with Freud before her, however, Klein was to experience what happens when a fertile but controversial new path forward in the understanding of human psychology gathers a following. She found herself having to defend her ideas from those who increasingly vocally disagreed with her ideas, including the persistently brutal attacks of her own daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, herself a psychoanalyst, and those of Anna Freud’s partisans, who had a very different approach to child psychology. In addition, she felt compelled to protect her thought from those who agreed with her concepts and wanted to push them beyond the borders she originally laid out. She became as controlling as Freud of the strict correctness of her ideas as stated in her foundational writings, and not a few supporters found themselves flung from her good graces on the grounds of minor differences of opinion.
In 1938, Sigmund and Anna Freud arrived in England, fleeing Nazi persecution, as part of a wave of continental psychoanalysts whose safe passage to England and the United States was orchestrated by Ernest Jones. Klein was worried about the arrival of her great rival, even to the point of being critical of Jones’s refugee efforts, but in the end a tentative truce known as the “Ladies Agreement” was laid out in 1946 which prevented the British Psycho-analytical Society from irrevocably splitting into sniping factions by making space for both the devotees of Anna Freud and those of Melanie Klein. Klein for her part continued to develop her thought into her seventh decade of life, focusing on how early internalizations and frustrations continue to have ramifications in adult life that manifest themselves in how humans experience envy, grief, and the fragmentation of an individual’s cohesive sense of self.
Klein died in 1960, never having reconciled with her daughter Melitta, who did not attend her funeral, and having witnessed her grip on the British Psycho-analytical Society gradually erode as medically trained and biologically oriented individuals rose through the ranks, making her insightful and intuitive approach to analysis seem increasingly like whispers of psychoanalysis’s primal past. She had, however, decidedly left her mark on the development of psychoanalytic theory, and today, though individuals might disagree about the content of early psychological development, and the particular ratios of outside influences versus internalized individuals that determine our behaviors and approach to reality, there is no longer a question of ignoring these ideas altogether. Klein showed us that we are filled with other people, and that the sooner we make ourselves acquainted with them, the more we can understand who we are and why we do what we do.
FURTHER READING:
Melanie Klein is perhaps the most written about woman in the history of psychology, so in a welcome change we find ourselves not having to make do with the sources at hand, but having to choose which one to approach first. The one that online book vendors tend to throw at you is Hinshelwood and Fortuna’s Melanie Klein: The Basics (2018) but the structure of the book (which might just be the decreed structure for all Basics titles) I find adversarial to grasping the flow of her life and work. If you want a good summary of decent length, the section in Janet Sayers’s Mothers of Psychoanalysis (1991) is a good place to start, or if you want to just dive right in I like Phyllis Grosskurth’s Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (1986) quite a lot as a thorough account from a time when Klein was deceased but still very much a living Presence, which takes seriously the genesis and development of her ideas while also detailing the idiosyncrasies of Klein as a person and intellectual. If you want to read Klein herself, you can still get copies of the excellent four volume The Writings of Melanie Klein series put out by The Free Press in 1984.
She also features in our A History of Women in Psychology and Neuroscience, available now!!
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