Klein, Melanie Reizes

   (1880–1960)

   Leading theorist of the unconscious in early stages of infancy, Melanie Klein was born in Vienna, the daughter of a physician. She studied art and history at Vienna University, without graduating, then at the age of 21 married Arthur Klein, a chemist, and followed him to Budapest. Here, she became enthusiastic about the new discipline of psychoanalysis and underwent an analysis * In 1959, John Mark Hinton, then a senior registrar at the Maudsley Hospital (and later successor to Denis Hill as professor of psychiatry at Middlesex Hospital), had already shown in the Journal of Mental Science that the antipsychotic perphenazine was effective in depression. There is also anecdotal evidence from Jean Sigwald’s trial in 1953 that chlorpromazine had done well as an antidepressant. with Freud’s disciple Sandor Ferenczi (1873–1933), reading a paper on child development in 1919 to the Budapest Psycho-Analytical Society. In 1921, she separated from her husband, he moving to Sweden and she, at the invitation of psychoanalyst Karl Abraham (1877–1925), moving to Berlin, where she became involved in the psychoanalysis of children and started to develop the psychoanalytic play technique for which she became known. In 1925, at the invitation of English psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, she lectured on psychoanalysis in London, moving there the following year. It was in England that she developed her great reputation as a child analyst, later proceeding to the analysis of adults as well. Her theories polarized much of the membership of the budding British Psychoanalytic Society, the "Kleininans" endorsing her ideas about introjection and projection, as opposed to the rival theories of Anna Freud. In 1932, she published a major work, The Psycho-Analysis of Children. As her biographer, John Arnold Lindon explains, "Introjection and projection function from the beginning of postnatal life as some of the earliest activities of the ego. Introjection implies that the outer world . . . is experienced as taken into the self and thus becomes part of the infant’s inner life." "Projection alters the infant’s impression of his environment, and by introjection this changed picture of his environment influences what goes on in his mind. Thus an inner world is built up that is partly a reflection of the external one" (Psychoanalytic Pioneers, pp. 366–367). Other Kleinian concepts such as "splitting" and "projective identification" permitted Klein, a lay analyst, to build a bridge between the experiences of early childhood and the formation of psychiatric symptoms in the adult.