Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein (/klaɪn/; German: [klaɪn]; née Reizes; 30 March 1882 – 22 September 1960) was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein's work primarily focused on the role of ambivalence and moral ambiguity in human development. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, which resulted in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences. The quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distresses a person experiences later in life.

Melanie Klein was born into a Jewish family and spent most of her early life in Vienna, Austria. She was the fourth and final child of parents Moriz, a doctor, and Libussa Reizes.

At the age of 21, she married an industrial chemist, Arthur Klein, and soon after gave birth to their first child, Melitta. Klein then had her second child, Hans, in 1907 and her third and final child, Erich, in 1914. After having those two additional children, Klein suffered from clinical depression as these pregnancies took a toll on her. This and her unhappy marriage soon led Klein to seek treatment. Shortly after her family moved to Budapest in 1910, Klein began a course of therapy with psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. It was during their time together that Klein developed an interest in the study of psychoanalysis.^{[citation needed]}

Encouraged by Ferenczi, Klein began her studies by observing her own children. During this time, there was little documentation on the topic of psychoanalysis in children. Klein took advantage of this by developing her "play technique". According to Klein, play is symbolic of unconscious material that can be interpreted and analyzed in the same way that dreams and free associations are in adults. Later, her research contributed to the development of play therapy.^{[citation needed]}

Klein was one of the first to use traditional psychoanalysis with young children. She was innovative in both her techniques (such as working with children using toys) and her theories on infant development.^{[citation needed]}

By observing and analyzing the play and interactions of children, Klein built on the work of Freud's unconscious mind. Her dive into the unconscious mind of the infant yielded the findings of the early Oedipus complex, as well as the developmental roots of the superego.^{[citation needed]}

Klein's theoretical work incorporates Freud's belief in the existence of the death drive, reflecting the notion that all living organisms are inherently drawn toward an "inorganic" state, and therefore, somehow, towards death. In psychological terms, Eros (properly, the life drive), the postulated sustaining and uniting principle of life, is thereby presumed to have a companion force, Thanatos (death drive), which seeks to terminate and disintegrate life (although Freud never used the term "Thanatos" in his own writing). Both Freud and Klein regarded these "bio-mental" forces as the foundations of the psyche. These primary unconscious forces, whose mental matrix is the id, spark the ego—the experiencing self—into activity. Id, ego, and superego, to be sure, were merely shorthand terms (similar to the instincts) referring to highly complex and mostly uncharted psychodynamic operations.

Klein's work on the importance of observing infants began in 1935 with a public lecture in London on weaning.^{[citation needed]}