1st December 2022

Melanie Klein
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Melanie Klein’s life
• First major female figure in
psychoanalysis, hugely influential in the
establishment of the British Object
Relations school.

• Born 1882 (about 25 years younger

than Freud, and 7 years younger than
Jung) in Austria to a Polish-Hungarian
Jewish family.

• “Her life of loss and turmoil is reflected

in the grim picture she paints of her
special area: the early months of infancy
and the psychotic anxieties that relate
to them.” (Gomez, 1997, p. 29)
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 Melanie Klein’s life
• Grosskurth’s biography (1986) gives great
detail of her early life, especially Melanie’s
idealisation of her mother, Libussa (who is
portrayed as manipulative and intrusive)
and her brother, Emanuel, who died in
1902 (soon after their father’s death).

• Melanie didn’t go to University but got

married instead to Arthur Klein – a
largely loveless marriage. They had three
children together, but Melanie suffered
from post-natal and ongoing depression,
spending very long periods of time away Melanie, age 8 years old

from her children to ‘recover’.

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Melanie Klein
• In 1914, her mother dies and she enters
analysis with Sándor Ferenczi.

Sándor Ferenczi
• After reading Freud and being in analysis with
Ferenczi, her depression lifted and she began
working on becoming an analyst and
contributing to the new field of child analysis
(analysing her children to begin with).

• Moves to Berlin in 1926 and enters analysis

with Karl Abraham.

• Invited to move to Britain by Ernest Jones,

which she does in 1927 (many years before
the majority of Jewish analysts moved central
Europe to escape nazism).
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 Melanie Klein
• In a letter to Joan Riviere, Klein remarks: “Nowhere else but
in England have I experienced this feeling of a very strong
sympathy and an ability in me to adapt to the strange and the
unknown.” (Grosskurth, p. 161)

• Hinshelwood (in Palmer’s documentary) says that Klein

“became the darling of the British Society. She was a middle-
European Jewish woman with a strong accent. And she came
into this upper-middle class, Bloomsbury connected,
intellectual, university educated group of British
psychoanalysts. […] the Bloomsbury group were all
eccentrics and they loved eccentrics. There’s one of Alex
Strachey’s letters describing how Melanie Klein came round
in this feathered hat, dressed up like Cleopatra out for the
evening for a thousand delights.”

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Melanie Klein
• Her ideas were controversial, so a
division in psychoanalysis emerged
between the London and the Vienna
schools. After the Freuds arrived in
London in 1938, there was a danger of a
split in the British Psychoanalytical
Society.

• Controversial Discussions clip

• Troubled relationship with her children:

Klein’s son Hans dies in 1934 (possibly
suicide, possibly to do with
homosexuality) and she becomes
estranged with her psychoanalyst
daughter Melitta Schmideberg (until
Melanie’s death in 1960).
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 Freud vs Klein
Worked with neurotic patients. Worked with children and
psychotic patients.

The self is coherent and The self is unstable and always

organised. under threat.

Anxiety is product of conflict Constant anxiety moving form

(wishes, retribution, guilt) annihilation to abandonment

Sex & Aggression (life and death Love & Hate

instincts)

Separated impulse from object Impulses already include the

(instinct has source, aim, object) object (also Abraham)

Oedipus Complex 3-6 years Oedipus Complex almost from

birth
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 Play technique
• One inspiration was Freud’s discussion of the ‘fort-da’ game of his
18-month-old grandson in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

• Freedom of play could substitute free association, and

material could be treated as dream material.

• Mirrored child’s language, but attempted to frankly interpret sexual

and aggressive fantasies (or ‘phantasies’). She was not in favour
of directing the child’s play in any way. (Klein, 1955)

• Toys represented significant objects in the child’s life, and Klein

interpreted the relationships between them.

• She observed that ‘accurate’ interpretations modified the child’s

anxiety.

• Conclusion that pleasant fantasies tend to be conscious, whereas

unpleasant phantasies are externalised, displayed in play activity.
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 Unconscious phantasy

• “They are the mental representation of […] instincts, and are physical
sensations interpreted as relationships with objects…” (Hinshelwood,
1989, p. 32)
• She observes material that suggest pregenital phantasies mainly
oral and anal, which means that Freud was wrong about the existence
of the stage of primary narcissism (a stage where no external
objects exist).
• She discovered what Hannah Segal later called symbolic equation
a major characteristic in psychosis and infantile thinking, whereby the
child imagines that, for example, an aggressive thought or feeling
toward a parent can physically harm them.
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Paranoid-schizoid position

• “Paranoid” because the

anxieties at this stage are
predominantly persecutory.

• “The leading anxiety in the

paranoid-schizoid position is
that the persecutory object
or objects will get inside the
ego and overwhelm and
annihilate both the ideal object and the self.” (Segal, 1988, p. 26)

• “Schizoid” because the predominant defence is that of splitting

(schizoid from the Greek σχίζω = to split)

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Paranoid-schizoid position
• Characteristic of the earlier months of life according to Klein,
although she more fully developed the ideas around it later in her
career.

• Splitting is perhaps the only way that the infant is able to put some
order into the chaos of the first few months of life: dividing
everything into good and bad: part objects rather than whole.

• It’s also a response to the innate death instinct (a Freudian

concept that most post-Freudians abandoned, but Klein maintained
and built on) and experiences of hunger and frustration.

• Good breast - the breast that is there when the infant needs it
Bad breast - the absent breast or the one that is introduced when
not needed. One must not contaminate the other.
This is crucial in the understanding of the transference.
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Paranoid-schizoid position
• Infant hungry > “I am bad inside” > projection of badness: “I hate this
bad breast” > “it wants to destroy me” or “it poisoned
me” (persecutory anxiety)

• Infant well-fed > “I am good inside” > projection of love: “I love this
good breast” > omnipotence: “I created this wonderful breast” > and
“I can [internalise] this good breast”

• “…the ego strives to introject the good and project the

bad” (Segal, 1988, p. 26) but also the opposite: sometimes “the good
is projected, in order to keep it safe from what is felt to be
overwhelming badness inside” and at other times “persecutors are
introjected and even identified with in an attempt to gain control of
them.” (ibid)

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Paranoid-schizoid position
• A new set of defences were postulated, to do with this ‘position’, and
more ‘primitive’ states of mind.

• Wilfred Bion later suggested the extreme defensive phenomenon of

attacks on linking.

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Projective identification

“The phantasied attacks on the mother follow two main lines: one is
the predominantly oral impulse to suck dry, bite up, scoop out and rob
the mother’s body of its good contents. [this is also relating to
introjection] The other line of attack derives from the anal and urethral
impulses and implies expelling dangerous substances (excrements) out
of the self and into the mother. Together with these harmful
excrements, expelled in hatred, split off parts of the ego are also
projected on to the mother or, as I would rather call it, into
the mother. These excrements and bad parts of the self are meant
not only to injure the object but also to control it and take possession
of it.” (Klein, 1946, p. 8)
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Projective identification

• The difference between projection and projective identification is

simply that the latter is more intense, there’s a quality of evacuation,
and in clinical practice, it is recognised that it often leads to the
therapist experiencing the projected elements as if they were her
own. [clinical examples]

• Wilfred Bion suggests that projective identification can be a useful

mode of communication, and this is widely used in psychodynamic
practice today. Often relevant when client is completely unaware of
an emotion and the therapist ends up feeling it ‘on their behalf’.
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Transition to the
depressive position
What does a smooth transition to
the depressive position look like?
“For the paranoid-schizoid position
to yield gradually, and in a smooth
and relatively undisturbed way, to
the next step in development, the
depressive position, the necessary
precondition is that there should
be a predominance of good
over bad experience.” (Segal,
1988, p. 37) …and this depends on
both constitutional and
environmental factors.
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 Depressive position
• Klein postulated that this is usually
achieved around the time the infant
reaches 3-6 months if everything goes
reasonably well. The infant begins to realise
that the care-giver is a whole object and
begins to relate to them in this way, having
at least some periods where part-object
relating is given up.
• “When the mother is perceived as a whole object, the infant is better
able to remember her, that is, to remember former gratification at
times when she seems to be depriving him and former experiences
of deprivation when she is gratifying him. As these processes of
integration proceed, the infant realises more and more clearly that it
is the same person – himself – who loves and hates the same person
– his mother.” (Segal, 1988, p 69)
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 Depressive position
• Main anxiety is that the object (care-giver) has been damaged by the
infant’s hate and rage. Paranoid-schizoid position: survival of the self;
Depressive position: survival of the object.

• “In the depressive position, introjective processes are intensified. This

is partly due to the lessening of projective mechanisms and partly to
the infant’s discovery of his dependence on his object which he now
perceives as independent and liable to go away” (Segal, p. 69).

• “When the infant becomes more fully aware of his own impulses,
good and bad, they are felt by him to be omnipotent, but concern for
his object makes him follow closely the impact on it of his impulses
and actions, and he gradually tests out [their] power… and his
object’s resilience. In favourable circumstances, the mother’s
reappearance after absence, her care and attention, gradually modify
the infant’s belief in the omnipotence of his destructive
impulses” (Segal, p. 73).
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 Depressive position
• One way of dealing with the anxieties relating to the depressive
position is that guilt often leads to attempts at reparation.

• The infant might also defend itself against depressive anxieties by

returning to paranoid defences or utilising more manic
defences: in the latter case, “characteristically, the patient rules that
the loved person is not important at all; their condition, damaged or
sound, does not matter. [Therefore] the object’s fate can be ignored;
the subject cultivates imaginary states of superiority, triumph, and
control over the object” (Hinshelwood, 1994, p. 92)

• Manic defences related to feelings/phantasies: control (denying

dependence whilst forcing the object to fulfil needs); triumph
(denial of dependence and phantasy of defeating the object);
contempt (denial of valuing the object and of guilt). [adapted from
Segal, p. 83-4]
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 Envy, jealousy, greed
• “Envy is the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys
something desirable […] jealousy is based on envy, but involves a
relation to at least two people [and] is mainly concerned with love
[…] Greed is an impetuous and insatiable craving, exceeding what
the subject needs and what the object is able and willing to give [and
it] aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and
devouring the breast […] its aim is destructive introjection” (Klein,
1975/1957, p. 181)

• Envy ruins the good object whereas jealousy does not.

• Envy is “a manifestation of innate aggressiveness. If the death instinct
is the impulse to hate the life of the subject, one manoeuvre is a
hatred of an external object which gives or supports the subject’s
life” (Hinshelwood, 1994, p. 140). It involves a kind of “spoiling of good
things, apparently for the sake of it” (ibid, p. 141).
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Klein vs
Winnicott
• The idea of envy as related to the
death instinct was one of the most
important points of divergence for
Donald Winnicott.

• Another important area of difference

was the importance of the external
environment on the development in
general, and aggression in particular.

• …more next week!

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