Melanie Klein: Beyond Freud
Psychoanalyst Known for 'Play Therapy' and 'Object Relations'
Apr 2, 2007
Melanie Klein was one of the first psychoanalysts who trained under Freud's theory. Her work has influenced views on infant care and upbringing, as well as developmental psychology. She wrote psychoanalytical books attributing depressions to childhood issues: The Psychoanalysis of Children, (1932) Envy and Gratitude, (1957) and Case study Narrative of a Child Analysis. (1961)
Melanie Klein's Family and Education
Melanie Reizes Klein, born in Vienna (1882), was the youngest child in a family of four. Klein was attracted to a career in medicine specializing in psychiatry but decided against it when, at 17, she became engaged to her second cousin Arthur Klein. The couple married two years later. She attended Vienna University. Her marriage was unhappy due to her husband's frequent job transfers and conjugal indifference eventually ending in divorce, as well as her mother's continual interference.
Depressive Influence
Throughout her life, Klein struggled with depression, significantly affected by the deaths of all her three children, first, of two siblings and later, of Hans, her eldest son. Klein moved to Britain where she became a controversial but powerful influence in British Psychoanalytical Society. She died in London, 1960.
Klein's Career
Melanie Klein's interest in psychoanalysis sparked after reading Sigmund Freud's On Dreams (1902), the same year her mother died. This intensified her depression. She became a patient of psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, one of Sigmund Freud's associates, who encouraged her to psychoanalyze her own children, and urged her to study the psychoanalysis of young children in general. Klein did.
A year after Klein met Sigmund Freud at an International Psycho-analytic Congress in Budapest (1918), she published her first psychoanalytic paper "The Development of a Child" which she presented to the Budapest Congress of Psychoanalysis. She was admitted membership in the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society and joined Karl Abraham's Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin.
'Play Therapy' and 'Object Relations' Techniques
From Klein's psychoanalytical studies, she developed the 'play therapy' technique - the first important therapeutic innovation designed to suit psychoanalytic methods to young children. In play therapy, Klein believed that the children's unconscious motivation is uncovered as they project their feelings through the use of play and drawings. For example, the way they play toys reveal earlier infantile fantasies and anxieties. Children could be understood through their non-verbal behavior.
The other technique, 'object relations,' was a collective idea of Freud, Klein, and W.R.D. Fairbairn - the children's earliest relationships, for example, with their caretakers. Klein's contribution was in forming the term 'part objects.' For example, breast-feeding in part is relevant in the development of the infant, as different from the child's relationshiop with the mother as a whole.
Melanie Klein's Contributions to Psychology
Klein's major contribution to psychology was her method of analyzing children's play for insight into their emotional development. 'Play Therapy' remains a standard method used by child psychologists.
Melanie Klein's research led her to conclude that children's aggressive feelings toward the mother and interpersonal relationships on development were more important than Sigmund Freud had thought. According to her biographer Phyllis Grosskurth, from Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work, Harvard University Press, 1986: "Captivated by the concept of the unconscious, she followed its seductive lure into speculative depths from which even Freud had retreated."
Sources:
MacMillan's Dictionary of Women's Biography, Edited by Jennifer Uglow (1999)
The Giant Book of Influential Women by Deborah G. Felder (1996)
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