Melanie Klein | Jewish Women’s Archive
In London, Klein initially found a very congenial professional climate. She developed innovative concepts based on her experience with children, and these began to assume the outlines of a new theory. At its heart was a vision of the infant as an innately social being, born with a capacity to relate by seeking and responding to human contact. The infant is able to “recognize” the mother, but this recognition is initially partial and piecemeal, centered on experiences of fulfillment or frustration at the mother’s feeding breast. The infant reacts powerfully to satisfaction and frustration, responding to worldly situations with the natural emotional equipment of love and hate.
Klein argued that the most disturbing emotion for the infant is anxiety, which is aroused by frustration and undermines security. The infant thus develops primitive defense mechanisms, which are deployed until the maturation process develops the mind’s ability to integrate different experiences of the mother and accommodate her as a more fully understood, “whole” being. Klein ultimately designated this process as a shift from a “paranoid-schizoid position” to a “depressive position.” She believed that the dual forces of love and hate continue to war in the human heart throughout development. A happy individual learns to reconcile these forces by subsuming the hated flaws and frustrating absences of the mother in an overall love for her. When the mother is internalized in the psyche as a whole “good object,” the foundation for security is laid, reconciling an imperfect mother and an imperfect world. Thus a balanced adult is able to manage worldly frustrations without becoming regularly overwhelmed by aggression and anxiety.
The years between 1926 through 1938 were Klein’s most productive. In 1927, she was elected a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, and in 1932, she published her first major theoretical work, The Psycho-Analysis of Children. However, she also suffered a series of emotional setbacks. In 1933, her daughter Melitta, also a psychoanalyst, began to attack her ideas, and Klein’s Berlin lover, Chezkel Zvi Kloetzel, left for Palestine. In 1934, her son Hans died in a hiking accident in the Tatra Mountains. Klein was too devastated to attend the funeral.
Towards the 1940s, Klein’s professional situation in the British Psychoanalytic Society deteriorated. After Germany’s invasion of Austria in 1938, Freud and his daughter Anna fled Europe and came to settle in London, where Jewish refugees encountered British antisemitism and were designated enemy aliens. Tensions and hostility between Jewish refugees and those already in the United Kingdom ensued. Trained as a teacher and more didactic in her approach, Anna Freud had already developed her own brand of child psychoanalysis, which seemed more in line with Freud’s thinking than Klein’s. Both of their theories had relevance beyond child psychoanalysis and implications for psychoanalysis as a whole. In London, Anna Freud questioned the status of Klein’s ideas, and the tension between them increased.
This tension culminated in the “Extraordinary Meetings” and the “Controversial Discussions,” a series of heated exchanges between Kleinians and Freudians between 1942 and 1944. Klein and her adherents were requested to make presentations of their key ideas to the British Psychoanalytic Society in its scientific meetings, so that these could be debated. One of the painful features of this period for Klein was that her daughter joined the non-Kleinian camp in a public display of opposition. Their personal relationship was also at an end. The controversial discussions were extensive, yet no theoretical conclusions could be unanimously reached. A compromise resulted in the division of the British Psychoanalytic Society into three schools of thought: Freudian, Kleinian, and Independent.
