Melanie Klein: Biography And Thoughts Of This Psychoanalyst
Melanie Klein is one of the main representatives of psychoanalysis. Although she was an admirer of Sigmund Freud, her way of conceiving her psychoanalytic therapy made her consider 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
Melanie Klein was a British-Austrian psychoanalyst who developed his own theory of psychoanalysis, based on the ideas of Sigmund Freud but introducing some concepts of his own authorship. She was a pioneer in the creation of psychological therapies for children.
She formed her own theoretical school of child psychoanalysis and became the first continental European psychoanalyst to join the British Society of Psychoanalysis. She was Anna Freud’s main opponent.
Childhood
Born Melanie Reizes, Melanie Klein was born on March 30, 1882 in Vienna, at that time the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Moriz Reizes, came from an Orthodox Jewish family and studied to be a doctor in the face of his family’s religious beliefs. Moriz married Libussa Deutsch, an attractive and intelligent woman from Slovakia twenty years younger than him. 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 that did not mean she received less love from her parents. What did mark his childhood was the death of his sister Sidonie when Melanie was barely four years old. Sidonie died at the age of eight from scrofula, a type of tuberculosis. As a child, Melanie always felt very attached to her sister, whom she remembered with great admiration for having taught her reading and arithmetic.
Adolescence
In 1898, at the age of 16, Melanie Reizes passed the entrance exams 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 her future husband, Arthur Stevan Klein a second cousin on his mother’s side who was studying chemical engineering in Zurich.
In 1900 his father Moriz Reizes died at the age of 72. At that same moment his sister Emilie married Dr. Leo Pick. The death of her father along with her sister’s marriage triggers a crisis for Melanie and the rest of the family To all this would be added a tragic event two years later when his brother Emmanuel died of a heart attack in Genoa, at only 25 years old. This death marked Melanie for her entire life because she was very close to Emmanuel.
It had been her brother Emmanuel who had encouraged her to study medicine. In fact, it was he who helped Melanie enter the Vienna Gymnasium. All this meant that, when her brother, Melanie, died felt deeply guilty about what happened Not because she believed that she could have prevented her death by studying medicine or anything like that, but because she knew that her impending marriage to Arthur Klein was something that was taking a toll on her physical and mental health. her older brother.
According to his biographer, Emmanuel was self-destructing with his budding marriage of Melanie to Arthur. Added to this, Emmanuel suffered from intense fevers when he was only twelve years old, probably caused by previous tuberculosis.
Tough marriage and family life
Having just turned 21, Melanie married Arthur Klein in 1903, taking his last name 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 nothing more than 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 He 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 him know his vocation. She began to feel a lot of interest in psychoanalysis, having the opportunity to be treated by great figures of her time such as Sándor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham.
In 1914, just when she began to become interested in psychoanalysis, her husband went to war and her mother Libussa died of cancer. Shortly afterwards and after several attempts at reconciliation, Melanie and Arthur Klein separated. Melanie is not known to have another stable partner, except for her lover, Cheskel Zwi Klötzel, a German journalist and author of children’s books, 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 his personal life would come from his own eldest daughter, Melitta Schmideberg. Although at first she agreed with the principles of child psychoanalysis that her mother had established, she soon She became an ally of Edward Glover, one of her ideological adversaries Melitta and Glover dedicated themselves to boycotting Melanie Klein’s theories at meetings of the British Society of Psychoanalysis. The fight was so bad that mother and daughter were 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 developed that would end her life. Melanie Klein died on September 22, 1960, aged 78.
Here we present 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 to join the ranks. As a result of stress, anxiety and everything that was happening in her life, it is this year that Melanie Klein undergoes psychoanalysis with Sándor Ferenczi, a close friend of Freud
In 1918, Melanie Klein listens to Sigmund Freud read his work “Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy” at the Fifth Congress of Psychoanalysis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. A year later, Melanie presents a study done with his own five-year-old son, Erich, to the Hungarian Society of Psychoanalysis The society rewards her with membership.
First analyzes in children
In 1921 Melanie Klein, Seeing how anti-Semitism spreads in Hungary, he moves to Berlin At this point in her life her true career as a child psychoanalyst begins, treating children, attending international conferences and becoming a member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society.
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 titled “The Development of a Child” in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. With this publication Klein gains quite a reputation, making figures of the stature of Karl Abraham and Sigmund Freud talk about her.
Achieving international fame
In 1926 he moved to London where he began treating children, including the children of the Jones family and his own young son Erich. In 1927, her main detractor, Anna Freud, wrote to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society about Klein’s techniques for analyzing children. In response, Ernest Jones organizes a symposium at the British Society talking about the same topic, 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 member of the British Society of Psychoanalysis Several years later, in 1932 he published his greatest theoretical work, The Psychoanalysis of Children, published in English and German simultaneously. During this time, Klein attended several conferences presenting the development of his theory.
Klein vs. Freud
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Sigmund and Anna Freud went to live in London.
On February 25, 1942, the first extraordinary meeting of the British Society of Psychoanalysis took place. The enmity between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud has reached such proportions that, now, Among British psychoanalysts, two sides have been created: Kleinians and Freudians During these years, the Freudian sector headed by Anna Freud, along with Melanie’s own daughter, Melitta, dedicated themselves to attacking Klein’s theories.
The differences between both theories were not resolved until 1946. It was then that a conciliation group or center (Middle Group) emerged within the British Society of Psychoanalysis. This group aims to calm the atmosphere and harmonize the differences between the theory of Anna Freud and that of Melanie Klein. In 1947, John Rickman, who was a member of this conciliation group, is elected president of the Society.
Related article: “The id, the ego and the superego, according to Sigmund Freud”
Among Melanie Klein’s contributions to the theory of psychoanalysis we find the following.
Oedipus complex and superego
Melanie Klein shares the idea of the Oedipus complex with Sigmund Freud a concept that defends that the boy or girl wishes to take the place of the parent of the same sex and intends to establish a sexual-emotional relationship with his or her other parent.
In Freud’s model it is explained that this phase occurs between three and five years. On the other hand, 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 child shows cruel characteristics related to body orifices, such as the mouth or anus and this would be a consequence, from the perspective of the psychoanalytic model, a consequence of the projections of his own sexuality. Melanie Klein argued that the frustration that weaning and incorporating foods into their diet plays a very important role in children.
As for the superego or superego, Freudian theory explains it as that part of our being that represents the ethical thoughts acquired by 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 from the time 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 appears 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 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 later episodes of the child’s development. The child conceives of the mother as a part centered on her breast, which she perceives as “good breast” when she feeds him and “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 Melanie Klein’s main works we highlight:
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 (“Narrative of the Psychoanalysis of a Child”).
