Melanie Klein

By: Alyssa Pendolino

Biography

Born in Vienna, Austria, she original dream

was to attend medical school. She married
Arthur Klein at age 19, and had had two
children. She briefly attended Vienna
University. She traveled a lot due to her
husbands job but then settled in Budapest in
1910. She had her third child in 1914.

Contributions
Klein extended Sigmund Freuds
understanding of the unconscious mind.
By analyzing childrens play she explored
the mind of infants. She found an early
Oedipus complex and the earliest signs of
the superego.
Klein is best known for her two areas of
work in:
Play Therapy
Object Relations

Play Therapy

substitute for Freud's free association.

She believed that children projected their feelings
through drawings & creative play. She showed that the
way children played with toys revealed wants and fears.
Children's unconscious could be understood through
their physical actions.
In The Psychoanalysis of Children(book written by
Klein), she showed how these fears affected a child's
ego, superego, and sexuality that could bring emotional
disorders.

Object Relations Theory

Object Relations Theory is a theory of relationships
between people. Mostly within a family and especially
between a mother and her child.
The object relations theory suggests that during the
formation of early relationships, the infant psyche
identifies objects by the function they have. For
example, a hand that touches and cares for the infant is
seen as a good hand. But a mouth that yells is seen as a
bad mouth.

Depressive Position
The 'depressive position' is a mental state that is
understood to begin in the second six months of life.
The baby gains in physical and emotional maturity &
begins to incorporate its split views of its parent and has
a more cohesive sense of self.
The child brings together conflicted feelings of love and
hate of the parents, realizing the hated person and the
loved person are one and the same leads to the most
painful sense of guilt
The child has a wish to repair this. It is repeatedly
revisited and developed throughout early childhood, and
occasionally throughout life.

Klein's mark on psychology

Klein took focus off biological drives and put emphasis
on the importance of interpersonal relationships in the
psychological field
stressed the importance of mother-child relationship
her greatest accomplishment was the Object Relations
Theory

Sources

http://
psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/klei
n_bio.htm
http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/klein.html#play