Angol
She gave each child a box of toys, kept it between sessions, and read what happened to it as seriously as an analyst reads a dream.
Melanie Klein had no medical degree and no psychology degree. She passed her gymnasium entrance examinations at sixteen with psychiatry in mind, got engaged at seventeen, and that was the end of that. She came to psychoanalysis in 1914 as a patient, in the middle of a war, in a city that was not her own.
Nearly thirty years later, a substantial part of British psychoanalysis was meeting formally, session after session, to decide whether her work counted as psychoanalysis at all.
What she proposed is still the most uncomfortable idea in the field's history. Not that childhood shapes us - everyone agreed about that - but that from the very beginning the infant is already loving, already hating, already frightened of what its own hatred might have done, and already managing that predicament by splitting the world into a good side and a bad side. She called the two organisations of this inner life the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, and chose the word position over stage because she did not think anybody ever finished with them.
Inside:
Also here: the sister who died when Klein was four and whom she was still grieving at seventy-seven; the brother who died in Genoa at twenty-five; the son killed when a mountain path gave way; the daughter who attacked her from the floor of her own professional society and did not come to her funeral; and the ten-year-old boy she analysed in a borrowed Girl Guides' hut in Perthshire, both of them sent north away from the bombing.
This is not a defence of Klein and it is not a takedown. Her explanations of why may not survive. Her observation - that the mind is not naturally at peace with itself, and that maturity is measured by what you can hold together rather than by what you have resolved - has been harder to dislodge.
Written for the general reader, not the seminar room. Verified sources, no invented scenes, and the criticism given its due.
Part of Pioneers of Human Behaviour - gateway books on the minds that shaped us.
