談玉儀撰

3/29/07

Melanie Klein (1882-1960) was born in Vienna in 1882. Her father Moriz Reisez was a Jewish dentist and her mother Libusa Deutsch opened a shop of exotic plants and animals to support the family. In her life, Melanie was much closer to her mother. She studied art and history at Vienna University and later entered the medical school.

Accommodating her husband’s business life, she had to give up her medical career; eventually, she did not receive any medical degree. She was depressed and sometimes institutionalized in the hospital since her husband was not faithful to her. In 1920, they devoiced and Klein had to raise her three children on her own. One son died in a tragic climbing accident; some suspected that it was a suicide. However, her son’s death made her explore the relationship between mourning and primitive defense mechanisms. Through her clinical training with children, she extended Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and developed her most distinguished theories of object-relations and play theory.

Klein and Freud’s beloved daughter Anna Freud were two major eminent followers of Freud to expand his theories from female approaches, yet they had different opinions in the treatment of the child. Eventually their divergences resulted in the split in the British Psychoanalytic Society: the traditional Freudians of the “Viennese school” and the Kleinians of the “London school.” Anyway, Klein was probably the first psychoanalyst to emphasize the Oedipus concept in relation to the mother’s breast; this idea has challenged Freud’s account of psychic development that focuses on penis-envy.

British object-relations theory was indebted to the work of Klein; the major figures included W. R. D. Fairbairn (1889-1964), Wilfred Bion (1897-1979), D. W. Winnicott (1896-1971), and Michael Balint (1896-1971). One of them, Bion, has been the most influential of Klein’s students and analysands. Bion’s insights come from his work with schizophrenics that re-conceptualizes Klein's original thinking regarding envy and projective identification.